Long sentences at the end of the world

In plain terms

1954–1980s

Born on 5 January 1954 in Gyula, a small town in south-east Hungary near the Romanian border. He studies law in Szeged and Budapest, then spends years in poor villages and bad jobs: a spell in a mine, night watchman for three hundred cows, director of village culture houses. After he tells the police he does not write about politics, they take his passport. He has none until 1987.

1985–89

Satantango (1985) is a sensation in Hungary. The Melancholy of Resistance follows in 1989. Susan Sontag calls him the “master of the apocalypse”.

1994–2011

Béla Tarr films Satantango (1994) and, from The Melancholy of Resistance, Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). The two write the screenplays together, through The Turin Horse (2011). Seiobo There Below appears in Hungarian in 2008.

2012–24

New Directions publishes the English translations that make his name in America. He wins the Man Booker International Prize in 2015 and the US National Book Award for translated literature in 2019. Herscht 07769 (2021) reaches English in 2024.

2025

The prize, announced on 9 October. He hears the news at a sick friend’s flat in Frankfurt and tells the Nobel interviewer: “This is more than a catastrophe”, borrowing Beckett’s joke, then adds that it is “happiness and proudness”. Nobel lecture in Stockholm on 7 December; banquet speech on 10 December.

2026

Béla Tarr dies; his funeral is held in Budapest on 6 February. The Nobel lecture is published in English as Enough About Angels in April. On 8 September Germany awards him the Grand Cross of its Order of Merit; he has held dual German and Hungarian citizenship since 2017.

In English

• Satantango (Sátántangó, 1985) trans. George Szirtes, 2012
• The Melancholy of Resistance (Az ellenállás melankóliája, 1989) trans. George Szirtes, 1998
• War & War (Háború és háború, 1999) trans. George Szirtes, 2006
• Seiobo There Below (Seiobo járt odalent, 2008) trans. Ottilie Mulzet, 2013
• The World Goes On (Megy a világ, 2013) trans. John Batki, Ottilie Mulzet and George Szirtes, 2017
• Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (Báró Wenckheim hazatér, 2016) trans. Ottilie Mulzet, 2019
• Spadework for a Palace (Aprómunka egy palotáért, 2018) trans. John Batki, 2020
• Chasing Homer (Mindig Homérosznak, 2019) trans. John Batki, 2021
• Herscht 07769 (2021) trans. Ottilie Mulzet, 2024

Say it accurately

“A Christian novelist.” Or the reverse: “A writer who has given up on God.”

Neither label is his. In 2021 he said that “faith itself has come to an end”, and in the same answer that when the noose tightens “you cling to the Lord God with two hands, three even”. In 2012 he explained his long sentences this way: “Only God needs the period—and at the end He will use one, I am sure.” His Nobel banquet speech was a list of thanks that ran from a Gyula church sexton and cobbler, through Kafka, Kyoto, “Johann Sebastian Bach, for the Divine” and Prince Siddhartha, and ended “To God.” In the Nobel lecture he speaks of “our souls which are incapable of belief”. He uses the language of faith often and professes none. Let him speak for himself.

“His books are pure despair.”

They are bleak, and he says bitterness is his deepest inspiration. But the committee lists “pessimism and apocalypse, but also humour and unpredictability”, and the citation itself says his work “reaffirms the power of art”. Presenting the prize, Anders Olsson said that hope does not appear to be lost in this dark world: “It is just that we do not know how or when it will emerge.” A Hungarian scholar quoted by the Associated Press called the novels “incredibly funny”. When the motto of Herscht 07769 (“Hope is an error”) was put to him, he explained it through the physics of the universe’s first moments and concluded that “it really means that the world was born out of hope.”

“A Nobel winner, so a good pick for the church book group.”

He is hard going, and admirers say so. His sentences can run for pages; Herscht 07769 has one full stop in about four hundred. A Budapest bookseller called him “an exceptionally demanding and sophisticated author”. The prize honours achievement, not ease. A reader who wants to try him should start with Seiobo There Below, read slowly, and expect to be disoriented.

“The prize was a rebuke to Orbán.” Or: “He is a political dissident.”

He has criticised Viktor Orbán’s government, especially over its stance on Ukraine, but he told a Swedish paper that “There is no hope left in Hungary today and it is not only because of the Orbán regime”: the problem, he said, is social as well as political. Orbán congratulated him publicly. Under communism the secret police thought him an anticommunist, but he says he made no political demonstrations and told them he did not write about contemporary politics. The committee’s citation is about art. Do not make the prize a verdict on Hungary.

“Satantango is about the devil,” or “his apocalypse is the Book of Revelation.”

In Satantango two men believed dead return to a ruined collective farm. To the villagers they seem messengers “either of hope or of the last judgement”, and in Olsson’s words “it is impossible to know which”. The committee finds the satanic element in a con man’s deceptions and in the villagers’ “slave morality”. His apocalypse is terror and disorder in small towns, with no judge and no promised end. Biblical imagery is everywhere, but it is not a key to the books.

For preaching

• The man on the platform Instance

  James 2:1–6 · Luke 10:30–37 · Matthew 25:35–40

  In the Nobel lecture Krasznahorkai described something he saw in Berlin in the early 1990s. An old homeless man, in pain, was trying to relieve himself beyond the yellow line at the end of a U-Bahn platform, his face turned towards the crowd “like someone who counted on sympathy”. The crowd decided at once that this was a scandal that must end, and a policeman ran to catch him. James rebukes a church that has favoured the well dressed: “But you have dishonored the poor man” (James 2:6, WEB). The crowd in Berlin did what James describes. The lecture is the novelist’s own account, shaped as he tells it; but he tells it as something that happened.

• Going down to the poor Likeness

  Ezekiel 3:15 · Hebrews 13:3

  Ezekiel went to the exiles by the river Chebar and sat among them, overwhelmed, for seven days before the word came to him. Krasznahorkai, in his twenties, went to live among the poorest people in Hungarian villages, “because of my very huge impression of Dostoyevsky”, and stayed for years; Satantango came out of that life. He was no prophet and claimed no word from God, so his story is a likeness of Ezekiel’s, not a case of it. But it shows the shape of the thing: go where the afflicted are, and stay long enough to see what they see before saying a word about them.

• Angels in street clothes Likeness

  Hebrews 13:2 · Genesis 18:1–8

  The Nobel lecture opens with his announcement that he had meant to talk about hope, “but as my stores of hope have definitively come to an end, I will now speak about angels” (trans. Ottilie Mulzet). His new angels have no wings and no message; “they walk among us in simple street clothes”. “Don’t forget to show hospitality to strangers, for in doing so, some have entertained angels without knowing it” (Hebrews 13:2, WEB). The image will preach. His angels, though, bring nothing from God and are wounded by us; Scripture’s strangers come to Abraham’s tent with a promise.

• Hope that is not seen Likeness

  Romans 8:24–25 · Lamentations 3:19–24 · Ecclesiastes 1:2–11

  The lecture begins by saying his hope has run out and ends, after angels, human dignity and the Berlin platform, by saying he has spoken “maybe about everything—even hope.” Lamentations makes a similar turn after chapters of ruin: “This I recall to my mind; therefore I have hope” (Lamentations 3:21, WEB). The likeness lies in the turn, which a sermon can borrow. The grounds differ. The poet of Lamentations hopes because of the Lord’s loving kindnesses; Krasznahorkai names no ground. Paul’s “hope that is seen is not hope” (Romans 8:24, WEB) may speak to readers who find his bleakness more honest than easy cheer.

• Those who carry the work and do not understand it Likeness

  1 Peter 1:10–12 · 1 Corinthians 3:6–9

  In Seiobo There Below the great artists are mostly offstage. The committee says we meet instead “janitors, onlookers or devoted craftsmen, who rarely or indeed never comprehend the meaning of the work in which they participate”: drunken assistants carrying an unfinished Perugino to Perugia, an old craftsman carving Noh masks. Peter says the prophets served a salvation they searched for and did not see, and that angels long to look into it. Most of a congregation’s work is like that. The book is fiction and proves nothing, but its picture of faithful labour on a whole one cannot see is true to church life.

On the Wesleyan shelf

• Letters on *The Fool of Quality* (to Henry Brooke, Hull, 8 July 1774; to Mary Bishop, Haverfordwest, 18 August 1784)

  Wesley read novels and judged them by what they did to the reader. Of Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality he wrote to a younger Henry Brooke, not the author, that he “could not but observe the design of it, to promote the religion of the heart”. He offered to send the author corrections to the “structure of the story”, and later abridged the novel for his own people. Ten years on he was cautious: “I would recommend very few novels to young persons, for fear they should be too desirous of more.” He preferred true accounts. After reading Commodore Byron’s account of his hardships in his scraps of time, he wrote: “Sure no Novel in the world can be more affecting, or more surprising, than this history” (Journal, 30 March 1769). Krasznahorkai’s books are not built to promote anything, and Wesley would have asked what they do to the soul. That is a fair question for a preacher to put to them too.

• Heaviness through Manifold Temptations (sermon on 1 Peter 1:6)

  Wesley would have recognised Krasznahorkai’s villages. Poverty, he says, “may appear but a small thing to those who stand at a distance, or who look, and ‘pass by on the other side;’ yet it is otherwise to them who feel it”, and he cries out: “O want of bread! Want of bread! Who can tell what this means unless he hath felt it himself?” (§III.3). He allows the believer deep and lasting sorrow. What he will not allow is despair as a settled state: “there may be need of heaviness, but there can be no need of darkness” (§V.2). Here he and the novelist part company, and a sermon should say so.

• The General Deliverance (sermon on Romans 8:19–22)

  Krasznahorkai’s apocalypse has terror and no judge. Wesley’s end of the world is the deliverance of the whole creation, animals included. The creatures’ groans, he says, “are not dispersed in idle air, but enter into the ears of Him that made them”, and they will be set free “(not by annihilation; annihilation is not deliverance)” (§III.1). The novelist’s banquet speech thanked “the last wolf in Extremadura” and “nature, that was created”. Read beside his bleakest pages, this sermon shows a preacher how to take the terror seriously without granting that it has the last word.