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the complete review - fiction

Satantango

by
Krasznahorkai László

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : dark, heavy, heady

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "In dem als Teufelskreis angelegten Buch werden hoher (Prediger-)Ton und niedere Minne, biblische Metaphorik und drastischer Naturalismus, Endzeitvision und schwärzester Humor virtuos gekreuzt. So ist Satanstango nicht nur ein beißender Kommentar zu den letzten Tagen des Sozialismus in Ungarn, sondern eine Parabel über die Condition humaine." - Judith Leister, Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "(A) monster of a novel: compact, cleverly constructed, often exhilarating, and possessed of a distinctive, compelling vision – but a monster nevertheless. It is brutal, relentless and so amazingly bleak that it's often quite funny. (...) If this summary of the first half of the novel sounds baffling, it's a hell of a lot clearer than the book itself. László Krasznahorkai's scenes are designed to disorient and defamiliarise. (...) (T)his is an obviously brilliant novel. Krasznahorkai is a visionary writer; even the strangest developments in the story convince, and are beautifully integrated within the novel's dance-like structure. It's a testament to Szirtes's translation, 10 years in the writing, that Krasznahorkai's vision leaps off the page. The grandeur is clearly palpable." - Theo Tait, The Guardian
  
  
• "George Szirtes's fine translation finds a telling balance between Krasznahorkai's biblical luminosity and his satanic intensity. His inexhaustible yet claustrophobic prose, with its long, tight, weaving sentences, each like a tantalising tightrope between banality and apocalypse, places the author in a European tradition of Beckett, Bernhard, and Kafka. (...) We relish a gleeful pessimism -- just like Cioran's -- that can be so uplifting that it's surely no longer pessimism, but the magic of a melancholy resistance, and mercifully without all that mud." - James Hopkin, The Independent
  
  
• "The setup is typical of Krasznahorkai. On its surface, it appears allegorical and loaded with religious imagery, but his novels tend to construct allegories only to demolish them. (...) Satantango, Krasznahorkai’s first book, shares many of his later novels’ thematic concerns -- the abeyance of time, an apocalyptic sense of crisis and decay -- but it’s an altogether more digestible work. Its story skips around in perspective and temporality, but the narrative is rarely unclear. For a writer whose characters often exhibit a claustrophobic interiority, Krasznahorkai also shows himself to be unexpectedly expansive and funny here." - Jacob Silverman, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Sátántangó melds together elements of carnival, religion, black comedy, Hungarian politics and folklore into an open-ended allegory about the nature of storytelling itself: it is about the stories we tell ourselves in order to live and those we tell others in order to control them; about the narratives from which reality is constructed and the limits to which they can be pushed. Intoxicating and exhilarating, bleak yet beautiful, Sátántangó is a modern masterpiece that manages to speak both of its time and to transcend it altogether." - Beth Jones, The Telegraph
  
  
• "To say that Krasznahorkai's fictional universe is grim, dark, or negative is such an understatement that it almost ceases to be accurate. It is so grim, dark and negative that it almost turns into its opposite, not least in the humour of its exaggerations, so wild as to make the diatribes of Thomas Bernhard -- one of the likely antecedents for what is startling and odd in Krasznahorkai's work -- look almost tame by comparison. (...) When Krasznahorkai reads his Hungarian original aloud, the words flow more like a limpid, lively stream than like the torrential rain or dull muddy rivulets of his descriptions; his translator George Szirtes gives a sense of this, all the while holding on to the strangeness, the vulgarity, the vatic pomposity, the satire and the savagery. Szirtes lets the English-language reader gather that this is a writer whose ambition is matched by the range of expressive capacities he is determined both to deploy and to shed." - Dan Gunn, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "Der erste Roman des 1954 geborenen Ungarn ist zwar auch ein Dokument gesellschaftlicher Rebellion, doch um politische Freiheit geht es nur bedingt. Letztlich geht es um Erlösung. Und die wird weder bei Laszlö Krasznahorkai noch sonst irgendwo gewährt. (...) Schon Krasznahorkais Sprache inszeniert die Ausweglosigkeit. Ein weitverzweigtes System von Nebensätzen behindert die Orientierung und erstickt jegliche Transparenz." - Die Zeit

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Satantango is a bleak vision of a decrepit community. While written while Hungary was still semi-firmly communist (the novel was first published in 1985), the book is not specifically anchored in the failures of that time and system; Krasznahorkai's dark picture is a more universal and timeless one.
       The novel is presented in two parts, a dance of six steps forward, and then six steps back, the chapters numbered in ascending order, one through six (well, I through VI), in the first part and then descending order in the second: a round of no escape that leads right back to the start.
       The setting is grim and grimmer; even a description of going down a road is filled with portent, obscurity, and mire:

Night descends. No stars, no moon. At the Elek crossroads, a hundred yards ahead of them, a shadow sways; only later do they discover it is a man in a trenchcoat; he enters a field and the darkness swallows him. One either side of the highway there are gloomy patches of woodland as far as the eye can see, mud covering everything and, since the fading light blurs all clear outlines, consuming all traces of color, stable forms begin to move while things that should move stand as if petrified, so the whole highway is like a strange vessel running aground, idling and rocking on a muddy ocean.

Grumbling and ever more embittered, they roamed through the deserted halls of the moribund building, exploring in somber chaotic fashion the dismantled parts of rusted machinery and in the funereal silence the suspicion grew in them that they had been lured into a trap, that they were, all of them, naïve victims of a low plot to dump them there, homeless, deceived, robbed and humiliated.

Maybe there'll be life on the estate yet ? They might bring new machines, new people might come, everything could start all over again.

itkeptcollapsing she tri tr triedagain butinvainandshecried asshewassittingattheengineroomwindow andhadnoideawhatwashappening itwasdawnandgettinglighter oreveningandgettinggrowingdarker andshedidn'twantitall evertocometoanend shejusthadnoideawhatwashappening

- M.A.Orthofer, 1 March 2012

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Links:

• New Directions publicity page
• Atlantic Books publicity page
• Magvető publicity page
• Fischer Verlag publicity page

• About.com
• Bárka (Hungarian)
• Barnes & Noble Review
• The Bookbag
• Bookmunch
• Bookslut
• The Coffin Factory
• Deutschlandradio (German)
• Dublin Review of Books
• Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung (German)
• Full Stop
• The Guardian
• The Independent
• Krimi-Couch.de (German)
• The L Magazine
• literaturkritik.de (German)
• Los Angeles Review of Books
• The Millions
• The New Inquiry
• Quarterly Conversation
• The Telegraph
• Three Percent
• Urban Times
• Vertigo
• Words without Borders
• Die Zeit (German)

• IMDb page

• Official site
• Profile at hlo

• Animalinside
• Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens

• See Index of Eastern European literature

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About the Author:

       Hungarian author Krasznahorkai László was born in 1954.

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© 2012-2015 the complete review

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