László Krasznahorkai (Gyula, Hungary, 71 years old), Nobel Prize winner in 2025, was raised in a bourgeois Jewish family and his approach to literature came after several years of wandering around Hungary, in which he sought the company of those who lived on the margins. He wanted to dedicate himself to music before turning to writing, a field in which he debuted in 1985 with satanic tango, a work praised by Susan Sontag and made into a film by Béla Tarr, filmmaker with whom Krasznahorkai has contributed. The idea of “fixing” that first book and achieving what he had really set out to do is what has pushed him to keep trying again and again, the winner of the Man Booker International said in an interview in 2022 just a decade ago. In Spanish, his work, translated by Adan Kovacsics, is published on the Acantilado label, except The last wolf a book he wrote after a stay in Extremadura invited by the Ortega Muñoz Foundation in 2009.
Baron Wenckheim returns home. (Cliff,2024). As the title announces, the baron protagonist of this novel returns at the end of his life to the small Hungarian town where he grew up. He escapes from the gambling debts he acquired in Buenos Aires, where he lived in exile, and longs to reunite with his teenage love, Marika. The history of this peculiar place emerges between voices and stories of frauds, rumors, and local politicians. Meanwhile, the Professor, a scientist who lives retired in an austere Zen refuge outside the city, bursts in with long disquisitions with which he tries to avoid thinking. It is the most recent of this author’s works translated into Spanish.
Satanic tango. (Cliff, 2017). Krasznahorkai’s debut, published in its original language in 1985, made it clear that his work is eminently literary, far from realism and autofiction, a genre that he has declared that he is not at all interested in. In this hypnotic novel, the story unfolds over a couple of days of incessant rain and focuses on a dozen remaining inhabitants of a village. Failure and disappointment, infidelities, crimes and constant betrayals make up the plot of an infernal, tragic, comic and alcoholic dance, in a lost corner of the world.
Melancholy of resistance. (Cliff, 2017). Mysterious and surreal, the story of this book chains together strange events in a small town in Hungary. In the depths of winter, a circus arrives with the promise of showing the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world. Rumors about the mountebanks’ true purpose lead the city’s inhabitants to cling to cosmology, music, or fascism. The dread of chaos reinforces any semblance of order they feel they can cling to. The dreamer Valuska is the unlikely and tender hero at the center of the story.
To the North the mountain, to the South the lake, to the West the road, to the East the river. (Cliff, 2007, 2017). Outside of time and space lives the grandson of Prince Genji, who arrives at an ancient monastery in Kyoto. He goes in search of a beautiful and legendary garden and on that long path, poetic and serene in Krasznahorkai’s narration, he delves into the construction processes of that monastery, the geology of that land, and the search for ideals. The influence of Zen philosophy is something that the Hungarian author has frequently referred to and with this book he pays tribute to it.
War and war. (Cliff, 2009). The beginning of this captivating and beautiful novel gives the keys to a story that takes place between Hungary and New York. The story moves between suicide, the attack of some teenagers, the finding of a manuscript about the return after a war of two combatants and the prevailing desire to save the history that is contained therein. “I don’t care about dying anymore,” said Korin, and after a long silence, pointing to a nearby pond, he asked: “Are those swans?”