Tag: Postmodern Literature

Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes

How do we write biography? Well, depending on whether the subject has shuffled off this mortal coil or not, we could talk to them or else their relatives, friends, and enemies. Most likely we will spend a lot of time in archives, scattered around the country or world, reading journals and diaries, letters, and memoirs. To recreate the past we may need to read some history books, or better yet newspapers. If we are writing about a creative person we ought to read their books or watch their films, over and over. And yet if we do only this, we may still end up with something rather soulless.

Richard Holmes employed the “footsteps method”. He would literally retrace the steps of his quarries throughout their lives, allowing himself to imagine his way into their lives in a way that merely memorising poetry could not do. I myself have been to a Dostoevsky house museum in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, two Tolstoy ones in the former city, and there is a Dickens museum not far from me where I am now staying in London. Sometimes seeing these old places can really bring the writers back to life, but more often it seems to be the objects inside them that do that. The Akhmatova museum in Petersburg stands out as doing a great job of reminding me how awful that period of the Soviet Union was for many of its people.

Julian Barnes’ novel and non-fiction work, Flaubert’s Parrot, is an attempt at writing a biography of Flaubert. I say attempt only because its failure is deliberate, and the fault of the narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, rather than his creator. We learn a great deal about Flaubert, but far more about the nature of biography. Each chapter seems to employ a different approach to dealing with Flaubert as if Braithwaite is trying to work out which approach will stick. Here are a few examples of what I mean:

We have a chronology chapter, which contains three different chronologies of Flaubert’s life with a little bit of editorial commentary. In the first, Flaubert emerges as a successful, cheery, and social being; in the second his life is one of misery, disappointment, and financial problems; the third is made of extracts from his letters. Each chronology, in fact, quotes from Flaubert, but each ends up leading to an entirely different impression of the man. The authority that we expect to come from the primary source – his letters – only serves to make us look silly for trusting any of the chronologies at all. One message we might take away is just how easy biography, even a simple chronology, can be used to manipulate or mislead.

Another chapter imagines Louise Colet, Flaubert’s legendary mistress (who saved an awful lot of his most fascinating letters for us lucky readers in posterity), and the story she would tell of him. This is imaginative biography, giving us another perspective. One chapter looks at Flaubert through the various animals he used to compare himself to (bears, dogs, sheep, camels etc); another looks at him through the books he hadn’t written, the decisions he hadn’t made in life – a sort of “what if” biography; still another explores his attitude to that most awful of modern inventions, the choo-choo train. What is so brilliant about Flaubert’s Parrot is that each of these angles manages, even while occasionally (deliberately) sharing choice extracts from the letters and novels, to tell us something new about Flaubert, and cast him in a completely different light. Nothing alone, certainly not traditional biography, can fully capture the soul.

A murky patch in Flaubert’s biography concerns an English governess, so Barnes creates some letters that have fallen into the hands of a rival academic (Braithwaite is actually a doctor) which would blow open the academic consensus and bring our narrator fame and glory. The academic relates the story of how he came upon these letters, tells what they contained, but finally informs Braithwaite that he burned them out of respect for Flaubert’s wishes on the matter. Our narrator is outraged – his chances at fame and glory have gone down drastically.

But here there is also something else at play. Biography is often about solving mysteries, eliminating those last few blank spots in the chronology with a fantastic discovery. One of the most memorable pieces of Holmes’ Footsteps concerns his travels around Italy, attempting to work out the truth of Percy Shelley’s relationship with Claire Clairmont, a woman who accompanied him and his wife during their own time there. Biography is about taking control over the past and bringing it into order, and Braithwaite has just had the past rebuff him. There were several times as I was reading Flaubert’s Parrot where I thought of W.G. Sebald’s novels – Austerlitz or The Emigrants. In both we have a narrator attempting to recover the past, by all possible means, only to be disappointed. It is not so easy to recapture the world.

Just as literature is not the real world, so too is a biography of a literary figure not the same as that of a friend. Initially, our impression of Braithwaite places him as one of those stock characters we see in 20th-century fiction – the cynical old man spitting on the world and obsessed with his work. For example, Braithwaite gets more upset by moments in Flaubert’s life than he does revisiting memories of his participation in the Second World War. During the chapter involving the letters, he seems positively monomaniacal. But as the book progresses, we get hints of a troubled relationship with his wife, and finally her suicide. For example, we linger longer on the topic of adultery than perhaps even a book on Flaubert warrants.

All this puts the experiments at writing Flaubert’s life in a new light. We might say that Braithwaite is trying to work out what kind of biography might allow him to make sense of his own life, his own loss. Is it a little dictionary of important people, or is it a fictionalised telling of his wife’s side of things? His cynicism finally seems more tragic than tedious, because we see immediately what it takes him a whole book to realise – that life and literature, research, and intimate biography, are separated by a chasm:

“Ellen. My wife: someone I feel I understand less well than a foreign writer dead for a hundred years. Is this an aberration, or is it normal? Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.”

Fiction is a way of building a world where things make sense. And biography is just fiction that sticks close to its source material. But life does not make sense. Letters are burned, lives are ended, in ways that are incomprehensible, and no moral waits for us at the end of the tunnel. Flaubert’s Parrot tells us about Flaubert, and it tells us about Braithwaite’s wife. But it is only Flaubert who seems comprehensible by the book’s end, only Flaubert whose actions can be explained by whichever explanation offered by the book seems to make the most sense to us.

We come away from the novel with a sense of a world that is limited. After the humour (which Flaubert’s Parrot is full of) and the literary games, there comes unease. Biography is so much less comprehensive than we had previously imagined, so much less respective of the truth – because we see that the truth is impossible to determine. Literature appears a refuge, as always, but a cowardly one. And so, we return to the real world, uncertain, because that’s the only thing for it.

I really enjoyed the novel, in case that does not come through. It’s really good fun, and its experimentation serves an obvious purpose. At the same time, it is informative on Flaubert in a way that feels far more useful than a full biography. For example, there’s a chapter on common complaints about Flaubert (his politics, his pessimism, his women) and their rebuttals. This kind of approach is far more exciting and dynamic than just a footnote in a stodgy tome. The novel achieves what the best experimental fiction of our age does – it reveals that there are more ways to read and write than we had hitherto realised and that what is familiar may not even be the best. In this Flaubert’s Parrot is not just inspiring, it’s vital too.

Chopping Down the Bourgeoisie – Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters

I am not, on the whole, a fan of what I would call “closed-box novels”. Those torturous first-person narratives which Beckett and Murnane and so many others like to write, where our main character is generally floating in space, very rarely lucky enough to be trapped in a small box. From within this cramped environment they ramble, complain, whatever. But given how far detached from our own world theirs is, I get very little from them. Such narratives neither bring us closer to our fellows, nor do they ever appear to have any positive message to impart at all. Just pessimism and cynicism. If I wanted that, I’d go outside.

Thomas Bernhard’s novel Woodcutters is in some sense one of these closed-box mysteries. The main character spends most of the narrative sitting in a chair at a party, reminiscing or else thinking ill of those around him. A little later he has a bite to eat, sits and listens to an actor discourse, and finally goes home. What action there is lies within his mind until very late in the story. Though it is unparagraphed, and though it has a certain peculiar disconnection from human life that reminds me of Beckett, I ended up enjoying the novel. There was some light within its caverns, and the writing is also (trans. David McLintock) far funnier than I had expected.

I suppose I would like to open the box, and explain briefly what value to us in the real world this novel might have.

Plot Introduction

Woodcutters is set in Bernhard’s native Austria, in the Vienna of the 1980s. Our narrator is a writer, temporarily back in his homeland from England, where he appears to be in self-imposed exile. While in Vienna he accidentally encounters the Auersbergers – a married couple and old friends from the 50s, whom our narrator now despises, and they give him an invitation to “an artistic dinner” that he somehow fails to decline. He also hears of the suicide, by hanging, of their mutual friend, a woman called Joana. The action of Woodcutters takes place during this dinner, the same day as Joana’s funeral – first as our narrator sits alone on his chair, then during the dinner itself. The guest of honour is an actor from the Burgtheater, the most important Viennese theatre, but he is running late. Among the various guests is also Jeannie Billroth, another writer who the narrator despises.

Joana

The narrator’s treatment of his old friend’s suicide is rather ambiguous. As with most of the people in Woodcutters, Joana had once had a great impact on the narrator’s life, but since been abandoned by him. She had had a hard life, coming from the countryside to Vienna to be an artist but then ending up simply doing movement classes with actors. She married, but then Fritz, her famous fabric-making husband, ran off to Mexico without her. And so she drank, and drank, and the narrator is more surprised to hear that she had recently still been alive than that she had died. Why exactly she ended her life is unclear – what final thing brought her to go to the countryside and hang herself. But the narrator says he had always known she would hang herself, because she had dreams and dreams are not fit for this world.

Joana had been the narrator’s friend, and he had taken no interest in her these past ten or twenty years. Whether or not there is any guilt there is hard to say, but the cynicism of the narrator shouldn’t be confused with authority. At the funeral, which takes place in the village where Joana grew up and died, the narrator encounters John, Joana’s companion. At first he hates him, considering him an ill-educated peasant, but as he recollects the funeral his opinion changes, and he realises that in comparison with the bourgeois trash that were also there, John was actually a good man. He had organised the funeral, he had done his duty and looked death in the face in the way that the endlessly posing Viennese never had. And that, of course, is better than nothing.

Auersberger

Just now looking through the German Wikipedia page for Woodcutters I discovered to my surprise and, I think, horror, that these characters all have quite clear analogues in the real world. In many cases Bernhard did not even bother changing first names. That is a surprise because Woodcutters is full of characters with changed names. Joana was originally Elfriede, for example, and Auersberger’s name has also been pruned by him to make it sound more aristocratic. Everyone here is trying to be someone other than themselves.

The Auersbergers, “Auersberger” and “his wife”, are the hosts of the party. They have not changed in the thirty or so years that the narrator has had the misfortune of knowing them. The man is a composer, from the school of Anton Webern; his wife is a singer. Auersberger had promise, had genius perhaps, but now he is simply considered one of Webern’s many successors. He has a drinking problem, and occasionally goes for drying-out cures.

Their marriage is not happy – none in the book is. They are sustained by her money and these social events. They are, to quote our narrator, “perfidious society masturbators”. They have destroyed an entire village – the source of her wealth – by their indolence. As they do no work, they are forced to gradually sell parcels of land from her inheritance, which leads to land development. And no doubt by not working they are also doing a lot of damage to their souls. Everything about the Auersbergers is fake, dishonest. I particularly enjoyed the several pages where the actor talks about The Wild Duck, the play by Ibsen that he had been in, and not one person save Jeannie and the narrator has actually seen it. But in addition to the fake names there are fake books, fake libraries, fake relationships. Their whole world is false.

Auersberger, though, is terribly funny. He has drunk far more than he should and his wife keeps trying to force him to go to bed, whereupon he kicks her. But the best line in the book, I thought, comes when the discussion turns to suicide’s prevalence among the Austrians at that time.

“The Styrians are rather prone to suicide, said Auersberger, who by this stage was just about totally drunk and had become highly agitated. He told the actor that he was surprised that so few Burgtheater actors killed themselves, since they had such good reason to do so. Saying this he burst out laughing at his own remark, though the others merely found it embarrassing and glared at him.”

This gives a good idea of the humour in Woodcutters. It is cruel, but it is also shockingly funny. Yet I cannot leave Auersberger like this, because his particular character goes too far. The narrator is cynical, is brutal. But Auersberger – at least to me, reads as someone far more sinister, considering the context of politically unrepentant Austria in postwar period. When he starts talking about how “the human race ought to be abolished”, or “we should all kill one another”, it suggests a kind of unreformed Nazi nihilism, at least to me. So too does his destruction of chairs and wineglasses. He is good for a laugh, but not when you start thinking about him.

Jeannie and the Actor

Considering it is a broadside against Viennese bourgeois society, art naturally enough sits at centre of Woodcutters. Our narrator time and again refers to the way that Vienna consumes talented artists and turns them into mediocrities – Joana and Auersberger are but examples of this. Only Fritz and – we presume – the narrator, were able to escape the Austrian capital’s pernicious influence, and then only by fleeing abroad. Jeannie Billroth, who the narrator once served as lover, is one who has not escaped Vienna’s clutches. Styling herself as the Viennese Virginia Woolf, she is in the narrator’s eye a phenomenal mediocrity. Her days, he suggests, are spent pandering to politicians to secure pensions and prizes. After all,

“Artistic life in Austria is a road built by state opportunism out of people’s baseness and mendacity, paved with scholarships and prizes, lined with decorations and distinctions, and leading to an honoured grave in the Central Cemetery”.

If Jeannie is as untalented and inauthentic as everyone else at the party, the actor is almost the opposite. He arrives incredibly late, pays decorum no heed, but though he is for the most part boring, he is nonetheless himself. When Jeannie asks him, not once, not twice, not even three times but repeatedly until he cannot ignore her any longer, whether he could say, “at the end of his life, that his art had brought him fulfilment”, he at last snaps. He hates the party, hates the people there, and hates Jeannie above all. What he wants, what he truly wants, is “to go into the forest, deep into the forest… to yield oneself up to the forest” and be a woodcutter.

The actor, who had described to the uninterested listeners how he had holed himself up in a mountain shack in order to learn his lines and truly feel his role, is the real artist. Of course, he is as petty as the rest of them in many ways, and he does appear slightly ridiculous. Here is the wonderful description of him eating. It is truly amazing how Bernhard manages to convey the rush of the artist’s spooning in his language:

“Ekdal, he said, spooning up his soup, has been my dream role for decades. And then he went on, interrupting himself after every other word to spoon up more soup, Ekdal—pause for a spoonful—has always—another spoonful—been my—another spoonful—favourite part, adding, after two more spoonfuls, for decades.”

Truth-telling and Cynicism

Why mention the spooning? Because it makes the actor look ridiculous. It undermines him, and Woodcutters as a whole is about undermining people. It is about, in some sense, telling the truth.

“For years, perhaps for decades, we may have wanted to tell someone the truth to his face, the truth that he has never heard because no one has dared to tell it to him to his face, and then at last someone does it for us.”

It is only, obliterated by another person, that we can ever reflect upon ourselves honestly and turn away from the incorrect path that we are on. Sometimes, not even that is enough. In another moment that had me write “big oof” in the margins the narrator turns to a very drunken Auersberger, quite randomly after the dinner, and say

“that he had made a mess of his life and dragged his genius in the dirt for the sake of a rich wife and high living, that he had destroyed himself in the process and made drinking the be-all and end-all of his life, that he had exchanged one misfortune, that of his youth, for a second misfortune, that of old age, that he had sacrificed his musical genius for his revolting socializing, and intellectual freedom for the bondage of wealth.”

Big oof indeed.

Can we ever break out of the cycles that we are in? Are we condemned to them until at last, confronted with the sheer awfulness of other people, we finally snap? The cynicism of the narrator is not without its purpose. There is at least a kind of hope, if only for himself, that life can be better than an artistic dinner in Vienna. And as the novel ends he runs – literally runs – determined to make something of his experience that isn’t just a complaint. There is something to be valued here.

Conclusion

Woodcutters is the first work of fiction by Bernhard that I have read. I remember once starting Frost and stopping, but after Woodcutters I have already ordered another novel. Woodcutters is not quite the closed-box I thought it was. It is hilarious in a way that is relevant to us all, living as we do in a bourgeois cultural milieu (you are on this blog, after all). It is not too long either, and easy to read. Bernhard’s style has his narrator constantly going in circles, searching for perfect barb with which to pierce his old friends’ bubbles. And these barbs are not the end. There is a sense, a limited sense, that underneath the cynicism and the misanthropy there is a good world and a good life to be found, just not the one we live in and not the one we’re living.

But that’s what we have books for. To show the way to something better.

Satantango Review – False Hopes and False Prophets

I finished Satantango, by the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai (in George Szirtes’ superb translation), yesterday and am still reeling from the experience. Really, I had been reeling from the first pages onwards. This is the best book, the most exciting book, the most challenging book, that I have read in a long time. The only book by a living author I can compare it to without understating my admiration would be Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Both works are bleak and challenging meditations on apocalypse, on the state of humanity at the very edge of collapse. But even to compare it to Blood Meridian detracts from Satantango’s own unique and demonic magic. I’ve really read nothing like it before. It creates, in form and structure and plot, a completely new world.

So far Satantango is most famous for its 7ish hour film adaptation by Béla Tarr – naturally enough, since the translation was only published in 2012. I myself haven’t seen the film though – I actually came across the book and its author while browsing in Waterstones for something by Kazantzakis (my review of Zorba the Greek is here) and the really nice editions of Krasznahorkai’s works elsewhere in the “K” section caught my eye. From that I drew near enough for my short-sighted self to be able to see the titles, and I was immediately excited by The Melancholy of Resistance, and read the first page since I had time to spare. The prose, with its winding sentences and no paragraph breaks, put me off – especially since the book was already four hundred or so pages long. I put the book back, noted the author’s name, and bought myself Zorba the Greek as I had planned.

Once I had finished that, though, I went to the college library and gave Krasznahorkai a second chance. The only book there was Satantango, so I no longer had a say in the matter. I took it home with me for this Easter break.

Picture of László Krasznahorkai

László Krasznahorkai (b. 1954) has a rather devilishly mysterious look about him, and his Satantango is devilishly good too, even if its world is bleak.

Introduction – An Easter Story

As luck, or fate, or something else entirely would have it, Satantango is something of an Easter work. It begins, at least, with a resurrection. News of the return of two men, Irimiás and his helper Petrina, who were thought dead for over a year, interrupts the bickering over money going on between two men living in the small “Estate” where much of Satantango’s action takes place. These two resurrected men (the second chapter is entitled “We are resurrected”) have a reputation for their skill and adeptness in making money, and the bickerers decide to try to track them down, and in doing so see if they could make themselves some cash for their troubles. The other chapters of the first half of the book flit between the different major characters of the village, from the doctor to the schoolmaster, the local prostitutes to the barman, and detail their own reactions to the news. Gradually, they all converge upon the bar, the central location of the Estate, and there they begin to drink and dance, while they await the arrival of the man, Irimiás, who they all take to be their saviour.

The World and its Inhabitants

Krasznahorkai does an excellent job creating the tense atmosphere of a tiny village. In the first half of the book, characters of each chapter rarely meet those of other chapters, but through a process of endlessly layering more and more references to their names and personalities, Satantango gives the impression of a living, breathing community, so that when we do finally meet a given character, we’ve already heard all the gossip, and meet them as we would an old friend or enemy. There’s Mrs Halics, the most religious of the townsfolk, but a hypocrite at heart; Mrs Schmidt, promiscuous towards half the village but longing most of all for another night with Irimiás; and Futaki, the gloomy, melancholic sceptic with a limp. And many other characters, in both senses of the word, besides.

These people, trapped in an Estate whose owners are nowhere to be found, whose machinery no longer works, and whose business and industry has long-since departed, are in desperate need of some kind of salvation. Hopeless schemes for making money or getting away are made and fail by the second. In the first chapter alone Futaki and another man decide to betray a third, but only because Futaki caught the first man before he could betray him instead. Mrs Schmidt’s infidelity to her husband is only one of the many betrayals of a people who quite literally live in the mud. A recurring image in Satantango is the slaughterhouse, where people are merely meat. The first part of the book is in many ways a catalogue of the seven deadly sins of a fallen people: very few people here have any kind of positivity or goodness about them, for better or worse, which can add to the heaviness and challenge of reading through.

Style – Mud on the Page

But the main challenge when it comes to reading is that like The Melancholy of Resistance, Satantango is written in what I take to be Krasznahorkai’s signature style. There are no paragraph breaks, and sentences are long, intricate things. At first it was hard to read, but then I grew used to it. The whole book has a flowing, heavy quality to it, like mud. The decay and purification of the environment that the characters live in – nobody cleans, and cockroaches and other insects are constantly waging war for new territory – is marked by a similar decay in the prose. We sense that sentiment, expressed by Beckett at the end of The Unnamable, that “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”, in the way that the only thing that seems to be carrying on the prose is the way that the character haven’t died yet and that somewhere, misplaced though it may be, they have their hope.

It is difficult to tell where their hope should be placed, if indeed it should be placed anywhere. The novel has a strange, unnerving, supernatural side to it. It begins with bells, ringing even though there are no churches nearby, and that stop as suddenly as they start. But it is only some characters who seem to be able to hear them, which adds another layer of confusion. Elsewhere, in the bar, invisible spiders cover everything in cobwebs at a miraculous speed. And then, in the second part, Irimiás himself sees something that he cannot possibly explain rationally, try as he might. The novel’s chapter titles only add to the confusion, with part II’s chapter IV being titled “Heavenly Vision? Hallucination?” – nothing is given to us as a certainty.

Irimiás – The prophet the townsfolk need… or the one they deserve?

The character Irimiás, the resurrected one, inevitably forms the centre of any discussion of hope in the novel. It is he who, like a spider, literally brings together all of the major characters into the bar as if stuck in his web, and then disperses them as the novel goes on. He is a strange figure. Many characters see him as their saviour, and there are further parallels with Jesus too. He has two personal followers, Petrina and a boy, Sanyi, who go with him everywhere and do as he says. Petrina even confuses “Evangelical” with “evangelist” when describing himself. Yet if he is a god or even a kind of Christian, he is a strange one. When he speaks, it is rarely to espouse a Christian viewpoint. At the beginning of part II he gives a long speech, exhorting the townsfolk to repent and do better, but their response, privately, is just to assume he is joking. When he encounters the supernatural in part II he dismisses it, and God too, as unreal. His views are more likely a bleak nihilism of the sort he shows when alone with his closest followers, dismissing all hope and everything else: “we are trapped forever. We’re properly doomed. It’s best not to try either, best not believe your eyes.” Indeed, his nihilism is so great that he dismisses his senses rather than believe something. “We think we’re breaking free but all we’re doing is readjusting the locks.” And yet, he leads the townsfolk out into a wilderness; he gives them, all the same, a hope; he helps them. It’s hard to say why that might be. Harder still to know what to think when there are hints, in the background, of him stockpiling arms and munitions. He remains, even after finishing Satantango, an enigma.

Part of the reason that he is not closer to a traditional view of Jesus is that it seems a traditional Jesus is far from what the townsfolk, Mrs Halics excepted, actually want. Ultimately, it seems like almost all of their problems are due to money, or rather its absence. The girls who are forced into prostitution, are after money to pay for their mother, who refuses to work. The early scheming and betrayal of Futaki and Schmidt that takes place in the first chapter all hinges on trying to get enough money to escape. The barman obsesses about money too. And in this vein Irimiás, who is famous at least partially for being able to make money anywhere, also has his place. It is he who is hated by the barman precisely for his past debts (before his “death” Irimiás drank a huge amount without paying). That is to say, of all the characters, Irimiás is immune to money – he alone doesn’t need to pay it. He, indeed, has somehow transcended it.

The Politics of Negligence

There is also a political angle to the work. Published originally in Hungary in 1985, Krasznahorkai himself said that it was a miracle it made it past the censor given the political content of the work . But the politics of the text is not immediately apparent. These people, after all, are locked off in their Estate, and apart from their names there’s little indication that the work takes place in Hungary at all. But politics comes in as soon as we start asking questions. Why has the Estate fallen into decay? Because state support for the machinery needed for local industry has dried up. The cultural centre has also lost its funding and is in a state of disrepair. There is no longer a school for the headmaster to teach at. The depression and desperation of the citizens is an implicit critique on the system that has left them in this state – not of authoritarianism as bad and negligent governance in general. Anywhere where people are left behind, whether it be rural Hungary or my own native North-West Scotland, might see itself reflected in these pages. And in this context, Irimiás’ hints of weapons buying take on a more sinister note. It may well be that what the man is planning is revolution.

The ending of Satantango only complicates matters. I shan’t spoil it here, but it is one of those endings which makes the entirety of the material up to that point take on a new light, but not in a way that cheapens it. I was left sitting there, overpowered by the implications, for long after I’d closed the book at last. It’s rare that an ending does that to me. And I think when I eventually go back and read the book again, there will be a lot of new things for me to discover.

Conclusion

I loved Satantango because for me, it was one of those books that reveal our conceptions of what literature can and can’t do are limited, and show us the way forward. I feel like others must have felt when Kafka first emerged from Prague into the rest of the world and reshaped a world’s literature. Well, maybe Krasznahorkai isn’t that good – after only one novel it’s too early for me to say – but he certainly has already had a real and tangible effect on me. Satantango showed me a way of writing about serious things seriously, in a way that wasn’t preachy or boringly ironical. It may well be bleak, but it is also terribly, awesomely, sincere. And sincerity never hurts the message.

For more doom and gloom, check out my reviews of Andrei Platonov’s Soul and Other Stories, or Varlam Shalamov’s time in the Gulag. If, on the other hand, you’re in need of some cheeriness and affirmation, my review of Zorba the Greek is here.

Photo of László Krasznahorkai by Lenke Szilágyi [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]