The long sentence of the world: Who is Laszlo Krasznahorkai
Born in 1954 in the small Hungarian town of Gyula, Krasznahorkai worked as an editor before turning to fiction in the early 1980s
When the Swedish Academy announced that the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature would go to Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, many felt it was the completion of a sentence decades in the making.
For readers of Krasznahorkai — hailed by Susan Sontag as "the Hungarian master of the apocalypse" and by W G Sebald as a writer whose universality "rivals Gogol's Dead Souls" — the award recognised not only a singular prose style but also a radical faith in art's ability to hold chaos together, even if only by a comma, reports The Indian Express.
A slow dance of the apocalypse
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Born in 1954 in the small Hungarian town of Gyula, Krasznahorkai worked as an editor before turning to fiction in the early 1980s. His debut, Satantango (1985), introduced a rain-soaked village of con artists and drunks clinging to rumour and delusion. Adapted by filmmaker Béla Tarr into a seven-hour black-and-white film, the novel announced his signature qualities: vast single sentences, a tone oscillating between cosmic comedy and despair, and a fascination with people teetering on the edge of dissolution.
His later works — The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), War & War (1999), and Seiobo There Below (2008) — expanded that apocalyptic vision to a metaphysical scale. The 2015 Man Booker judges described The Melancholy of Resistance as "a vision, satirical and prophetic, of the dark historical province that goes by the name of Western Civilization."
Krasznahorkai's fiction resists the consolations of plot. Narrative, when it appears, is often swallowed by syntax: long, unbroken clauses that mimic obsessive thought. In War & War, a minor archivist discovers a mysterious manuscript, flees to New York to post it online, and then kills himself — a premonition of the digital age's desperate attempt to preserve meaning. In Seiobo There Below, perfection is glimpsed in flashes — a Buddha restored, a heron hunting, a Noh actor rehearsing — only to dissolve into impermanence.
Between the comic and the tragic
Krasznahorkai's bleakness is inseparable from his humour. His characters' monologues, like Beckett's, spiral into absurdity, their despair often indistinguishable from slapstick. In Satantango, Mrs Schmidt drunkenly declares, "Dance is my one weakness," as the village collapses into a dance of death.
In Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming (2016), a washed-up nobleman returns to his hometown, igniting chaos among gossiping townsfolk and a mad philosopher raving about being and nothingness. Critics called it "majestic" and "deeply funny," with The Baffler describing it as "his longest, strangest, and possibly greatest novel — suffused with nihilism, but deeply funny."
This mingling of doom and laughter defines Krasznahorkai's vision: endurance through absurdity, not escapism.
The Booker and beyond
Krasznahorkai's international stature was cemented with the 2015 Man Booker International Prize, which honoured his body of work rather than a single book. His translators, chiefly George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet, were essential collaborators, carrying the hypnotic flow of his Hungarian into English without breaking its rhythm. The Hudson Review described him as "a master of peripatetic, never-ending sentences that brim with vacillations, qualifications, and false epiphanies."
By the time of his Nobel win, his oeuvre spanned four decades and multiple genres — from the visual-musical experiment Chasing Homer (accompanied by percussive compositions and Max Neumann's paintings) to the meditative stillness of A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East, a prose poem of pure contemplation.
His later novel Herscht 07769 (2024), written "in one cascading sentence with the power of atomic particles colliding," depicts neo-Nazis, wolves, and a hapless physics student — an allegory of moral paralysis in contemporary Europe.
Themes of despair and transcendence
Across his labyrinthine sentences, Krasznahorkai circles the same obsessions: entropy, the futility of systems, and the elusive possibility of grace. His landscapes — whether a Hungarian village, a Japanese monastery, or New York's Bowery — are metaphysical stages where human delusion meets divine silence.
In his universe, apocalypse is less an event than a condition: the slow, daily unraveling of meaning. Yet beneath the pessimism lies something like faith. As Seiobo There Below reminds readers, beauty, even if fleeting, "reflects the sacred, even if we are mostly unable to bear it."
It is this paradox — despair yoked to awe — that makes Krasznahorkai the rare novelist whose pessimism redeems.
