Wood did qualify his comparison though – in spite of a common affinity for ‘very long, breathing, unstopped sentences’, Krasznahorkai is ‘perhaps the strangest’, his writing ‘peculiar … strange and beautiful’. James Wood, writing in the New Yorker in 2012, placed Krasznahorkai alongside post-war greats such as Thomas Bernhard, Claude Simon and David Foster Wallace. ‘There’s nothing else like it in contemporary literature.’ ‘he excitement of Krasznahorkai’s writing is that he has come up with his own original forms…’ writes the novelist Adam Thirlwell in the New York Review of Books. So much so that on the occasion of the release of Sátántango, another Szirtes translation, in 2012, the author was mobbed by hipsters at Housing Works Bookstore in New York City, where the critic James Wood was interviewing him. Krasznahorkai, who was awarded the 2015 Man Booker International Prize last Tuesday, is widely recognised as one of the very best and important novelists of our time. Sebald (‘The universality of Krasznahorkai’s vision rivals that of Gogol’s Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing.’). It was blurbed by Susan Sontag (‘the contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse’) and W. In 2000, the Hungarian-born British poet George Szirtes – who conducted this interview in 2012 by email – translated Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance, the first of his books to appear in English.

Until recently, at least in the English-speaking world, he was probably best known through the oeuvre of the film director Béla Tarr, with whom he has collaborated on several films over three decades, including the adaptation of several of his own novels. Interview with László Krasznahorkai László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954, and has written five novels and several collections of essays and short stories.

Satantango by lászló krasznahorkai