My choice today is The Melancholy of Resistance (translated by George Szirtes), a sweeping, dense work, as bleak as it is absorbing. After reading one of the few books that have made it into English, I’m even more convinced that this is something that must surely change soon… László Krasznahorkai took out the Best Translated Book Award in 2013 (for Satantango) and 2014 (for Seiobo There Below), as well as being awarded the final Man Booker International (Author) Prize earlier this year, yet outside the American versions (from New Directions) of a few of his books, there’s still very little of his work available in English, especially in the UK and Australia.
Compact, powerful and intense, The Melancholy of Resistance, as its enormously gifted translator George Szirtes puts it, "is a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type." And yet, miraculously, the novel, in the words of The Guardian, "lifts the reader along in lunar leaps and bounds.Since Patrick Modiano’s Nobel Prize win last year, there has been a flood of his books into English, but that’s not always the case with prize-winning authors. Eszter, plotting her takeover of the town her weakling husband and Valuska, our hapless hero with his head in the clouds, who is the tender center of the book, the only pure and noble soul to be found. The novel's characters are unforgettable: the evil Mrs. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find music, cosmology, fascism. A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumors.
The Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai's magisterial, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town.
From the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International PrizeĪ powerful, surreal novel, in the tradition of Gogol, about the chaotic events surrounding the arrival of a circus in a small Hungarian town.
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