The New Yorker:

The very strange fictions of László Krasznahorkai.

By James Wood

“Reality examined to the point of madness.” What would this look like in contemporary writing? It might look like the fiction of László Krasznahorkai, the difficult, peculiar, obsessive, visionary Hungarian author of many works of fiction, only two of which are available in English, “The Melancholy of Resistance” (which appeared in Hungarian in 1989, and in English in 1998) and “War and War” (which appeared in 1999, and was translated in 2006), both published by New Directions. Postwar avant-garde fiction, like postwar conventional fiction, has tended to move between augmentation (abundance, immersion, getting more in) and subtraction (reduction, minimalism, what Samuel Beckett called “lessness”): Beckett started out as an augmenter, and ended his life as a subtracter. But this division is not really a sharp one, because augmentation in the avant-garde novel often looks like a kind of subtraction: augmentation takes the form of an intensification of the sentence rather than an intensification of the things that many people habitually associate with the novel—plots, characters, objects. A lot has already disappeared from this fictional world, and the writer concentrates on filling the sentence, using it to notate and reproduce the tiniest qualifications, hesitations, intermittences, affirmations and negations of being alive. This is one reason that very long, breathing, unstopped sentences, at once literary and vocal, have been almost inseparable from the progress of experimental fiction since the nineteen-fifties. Claude Simon, Thomas Bernhard, José Saramago, W. G. Sebald, Roberto Bolaño, David Foster Wallace, James Kelman, and László Krasznahorkai have used the long sentence to do many different things, but all of them have been at odds with a merely grammatical realism, whereby the real is made to fall into approved units and packets.

In fact, these writers could be called realists, of a kind. But the reality that many of them are interested in is “reality examined to the point of madness.” The phrase is László Krasznahorkai’s, and, of all these novelists, Krasznahorkai is perhaps the strangest. His tireless, tiring sentences—a single one can fill an entire chapter—feel potentially endless, and are presented without paragraph breaks. Krasznahorkai’s brilliant translator, the poet George Szirtes, refers to his prose as “a slow lava-flow of narrative, a vast black river of type.” It is often hard to know exactly what Krasznahorkai’s characters are thinking, because his fictional world teeters on the edge of a revelation that never quite comes. In “War and War,” György Korin, an archivist and local historian from a provincial Hungarian town, is going mad. For the whole of the novel, he stands “on the threshold of some decisive perception,” but we never discover what that perception is. Here is a necessarily long quote from early in the book, as Krasznahorkai introduces Korin’s relentless mental distortions:

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