Even as László Krasznahorkai, the 2025 Nobel Laureate in Literature, is celebrated for his apocalyptic and dystopian vision, his prose brims with the curiosities, absurdities and dark comedy that propel readers towards that very inevitability
Few full stops — before punctuation, the Chinese writing system flowed without pause. In László Krasznahorkai’s Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens, the character László Stein searches for something like it in China: evidence of a continuous classical culture that reaches into contemporary society.
Perhaps the truest echo of this endless, searching rhythm is not in words at all, but in the body — its raw strength, its endurance, the “animal inside” that must be discovered. It is the same force that made one Hungarian, Ferenc Puskás, extraordinary.
Born in 1954 in the monastery town of Gyula, Hungary, southeast of Budapest near the Romanian border, Krasznahorkai was too young to witness Puskás’ dazzling brilliance. Stocky, sinewy, versatile and seemingly unathletic, Puskás played for the legendary Hungarian football team of the 1950s, the Mighty Magyars. He could dispossess an opponent, carry the ball on a long run and, with deft turns, twists and volleys, strike with his “lethal left” beyond the goalkeeper’s reach. For all his skill, he earned the nickname, the “Galloping Major”.
Or the sometimes gritty, sometimes languorous quality of Krasznahorkai’s prose could be heard in the English-language recording of one of Hungary’s most unforgettable musical legacies, Rezsó Seress’ Vége a Világnak (End of the World), the dirge known in English as Gloomy Sunday. It was recorded by the inimitable Billie Holiday, who would, at particularly painful phrases, employ the “loop down”, making her voice seem to fall off the record itself.
Or perhaps it is the cinematic vision that best captures him, beginning with the seemingly endless road to nowhere that dominates Béla Tarr’s evocative film adaptation of Krasznahorkai’s Sátántangó, with a screenplay by the author himself.
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The film unfolds like a tango — six steps forward, six steps back — made even more haunting by the soundtrack composed by Mihály Víg. At seven hours, it is brief compared to the existential weight it carries: the end of the world, or, in the particular case of Hungary, the end of communism.
This sense of despair and inevitability continues in Tarr’s The Turin Horse, co-directed with Ágnes Hranitzky and co-written by Krasznahorkai, which depicts the whipping of a horse in Turin, an act that drives the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to madness.
“I thought that real life, true life, was elsewhere,” Krasznahorkai confesses in a sweeping interview with Adam Thirwell in The Paris Review. “Elsewhere” meant the literature of Franz Kafka and, for a deeply impressionable time, Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry’s fiery novel set in Mexico amid searing heat and devilish parades, which chronicles the self-destruction of a single individual.
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With no ambitions of becoming a writer, “elsewhere” also meant taking on “bad jobs” — in a mine or as director of several cultural houses under the Communist system.
His writing began modestly, in small publications, and was shaped as much by the writer he did not wish to become as by those he did not wish to write of.
“As soon as I started to publish small things, I received an invitation from the police,” he recalls. “I was maybe a little too impertinent, because after every question I said, ‘Please believe me, I don’t deal with politics.’ ‘But we know some things about you.’ ‘No, I don’t write about contemporary politics.’ ‘We don’t believe you.’ After a while, I became a little angry and said, ‘Could you really imagine I’d write anything about people like you?’ And that enraged them, of course…”
The consequence was the seizure of his passport, a decision that may have defined the itinerant nature of his life after communism, moving from place to place, and the restless motion of his writing.
Sátántangó, his first book, set in motion what he himself described as a desire to “write just one book”.
In suspended sentences, in the interminable sequence of settings and incidents, in the flow of commas and the near-absence of full stops — “The full stop belongs to God,” he once said — his work unfolds.
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Across his novels and novellas — The Melancholy of Resistance; Seiobo There Below; Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming; A Mountain to the North, A Lake to the South, Paths to the West, A River to the East; and, his most recent, Herscht 00769; the textured pieces and stories in The World Goes On; the beautiful mélange of geography, classicism and history in Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens; the taut tension of The Last Wolf; and, a personal admiration, the novella Animalinside, powerfully illustrated by Max Neumann — there exists the inexorable, the long road of Sátántangó. Or perhaps the animality, the part-despairing, part-liberating howl, that drives Animal inside.
“He wants to break free, attempts to stretch open the walls, but he has been tautened by them, and there he remains in this tautening, in this constraint, and there is nothing to do but howl,” begins Animalinside.
The ‘howl’ — plaintive or ecstatic — is perhaps where the heart of the Krasznahorkai sentence is rooted. His love, even attachment, to the East, particularly Japan of the Genji period and China of the Shang Dynasty, reflects this sensibility. According to his Chinese translator, Yu Zemin, Krasznahorkai names the Tang poet Li Bai as his favourite, a figure who, like Krasznahorkai, captures the capacious allusiveness of the past while confronting the bleak, cataclysmic visions of the present.
László Stein, the protagonist in Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens, sets out on his journey in China: “It suddenly comes to mind how hopeless it was, indeed, the journey here ever- and ever- and ever-more hopeless, as in a fairytale, but at once he feels certain that he did the right thing, yes the right thing in designating Jiuhuashan as the first goal of his journey, his planned quest for the detritus of Chinese culture, yes, precisely, this abandoned Buddhist mountain: Everyone tried to talk him out of coming here, just what are you thinking, what will you find there, his Chinese friends asked him, there’s nothing there any more, nothing that you would hope for, no kind of hope at all, not least in Jiuhuashan, they noted disapprovingly, and they just shook their heads…”
Perhaps it is this pursuit of the useless, the futile, that gives Krasznahorkai’s prose its unique charge — in his sentences, not despairing but overwhelming — where the meticulous, the ghostly, the unexpected, the brutal or, in the terms of the Southeast Asian wayang (shadow play), the “life of everything” comes vividly alive.
This charge, this volition, this sense of the “life of everything” is, according to one of Krasznahorkai’s finest translators, the poet George Szirtes, “a vast black river of type” — a force so intense it drove him to exhaustion.
In awarding the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature to Krasznahorkai, the Nobel Committee singled him out “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.
Krasznahorkai himself has described his writing as “reality examined to the point of madness”. That madness is reflected in the fixed gaze of a Buddha statue being cleansed: “But this pair of eyes, if even touching lightly upon [the devotees], does not see them but looks onto a further place, onto a distance that no one here is able to conceive, everyone senses that, and the tension is extinguished in one blow, on every face great joy can be seen.”
Yet, it is only in suspended sentences, it seems, that the redemptive and the still can emerge. And, always, there is the act of striving for too much, if only to lift the curse of doing too little.
