The Melancholy of Krasznahorkai (And why it could be yours, too)

The experience of encountering László Krasznahorkai was similar to entering a profound, albeit unsettling, dream, for me. Like an immersive fugue state from which one eventually awakes up with cognitive rewiring. 

Although the Hungarian author won the 2015 Man Booker International Prize, he somehow managed to still remain as a precious secret among only the critics, translators, and the most committed readers, until now. A writer with such calibre to create a literary domain of his own deserves to be studied and revered by all who yearn to engage with the greater heights of contemporary literary art.

My introduction to László through 'The Melancholy of Resistance', perhaps his most celebrated work, was in 2016, shortly after him winning the Man Booker International. His hallmark, the gargantuan sentences often stretching across entire pages, felt like an invitation to look and see through the many bleak austerities of modernity otherwise made to seem trivial. 

After a few pages, and multi-page-long paragraphs, I was certain that there were not many contemporaries who could match his style of swinging swiftly within the depths of decay and the human spirit's cry for both despair and grace at the same time.

And the grotesque sequences of The Melancholy of Resistance continued, where the "end of the world" arrived along with a dead whale, and the absolute absurdities of a traveling circus that brought it. 

Among the peculiar showmen were characters like Mr Eszter, a passive idealist and an estranged husband who retreats into his obsession with music; Mrs Eszter, a manipulative widow consistently on the lookout for dominance; Prince, the world's largest whale's equally malevolent handler; and Valuska, a half-mad postal clerk whose naive wonder contrasts the town's growing chaos. 

Prince's compelling enigma throws the entire provincial town into a state of metaphysical crisis, and in search for a resolution, we find out how Valuska's futile attempts to maintain the impression of beauty and order against the encroaching filth ultimately epitomise the quintessential Krasznahorkai protagonist – a doomed, straining soul against the crushing weight of what we call reality. 

Through his hypnotic, meandering headway, Krasznahorkai captures a mass transition from gentle instability to mob hysteria, portraying how fear and ignorance often metastasize into authoritarianism.

László's demanding and hypnotic narratives will take you through avenues where the likes of Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Ishiguro, Gogol and Gabo had walked, and yet, somehow, land you at a destination so very uncharted. 

He holds a mirror to the readers' experience of being human under existential duress, with a call in each page to submit to his style of defiant rejection of the linear comfort that characterises much of mainstream fiction.

Beyond social and political, The Melancholy of Resistance appears as a staggering exploration of human psychological disillusionment, where the resistance is not against a visible enemy or regime, but against the very melancholy of one's existence itself and the "needs" it yields. 

It is a fight destined to fail before it has even properly begun. The Hungarian town's slow-motion collapse encapsulates Krasznahorkai's lament on the impossibility of order, with the loop being such that there are always some absolute and incontrovertible truth, which the wretched and the misfortunate believe they believe in, yet it is also always the case that this truth then proves to be a mere illusion, and so the cycle of melancholy continues, without an end.

An ode to Krasznahorkai, and to the certainty of his eventual, rightful Nobel Prize in Literature, is an ode to the enduring value of gloom and weariness sustained through art. You should read him because he is a writer who has fully comprehended the architecture of despair and the fleeting beauty of hope found only in the ruins.