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Some Worth to Read Books of
László Krasznahorkai,
Nobel Laureate, 2025
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Varga H. Mária
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László Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian writer who, earlier, won the Kossuth and Attila József Prizes. He is also the second Nobel Prize-winning writer from our small country. According to the Swedish Academy, he was awarded “for his impressive and visionary oeuvre, which strengthens the power of art even in the midst of apocalyptic terror”. The writer’s work has long enjoyed international recognition because he also won the International Man Booker Prize 2015. Moreover, his book The World Goes On was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2018.
László Krasznahorkai published his first novel Sátántangó in 1985. The novel depicts the everyday lives of those living in hopelessness, where the innocent faith of the only girl, Esti Irma, dies in tragedy. A depressing, yet deeply inspiring book.
Therefore, Sátántangó is a kind of perpetuum mobile; a structure of existence manifested through a chain of deception and breakage, which has no responsibility, only a state, onto which various beliefs; hopes, and self-deceptions are projected. Thus, the grandeur of the novel lies in the deadly dance of helplessness and immobility. And, the collapse of human illusions and hopes; the disintegration of social systems, and the easy gullibility of desperate people.
So, it is a work that was even then unlike anything else and has remained like itself ever since. Moreover, the novel was translated into several languages. Since Sátántangó has now turned into a classic, a basic work without which Hungarian culture, as well as world literature, is unimaginable and undreamed-of.
Relations of Mercy
The critically acclaimed book was followed by his first collection of short stories, Relations of Mercy, in 1986.
The volume describes the struggle of lonely heroes seeking a cure. And, reflects the author’s dramatically deep; darkly colored world. His heroes tirelessly research and will continue to research in a labyrinth. But, this labyrinth is nothing other than the place of their own loss. And, where a person can have only one goal: to understand this mistake; the structure of this mistake. They directly search for the cause of their own unrest; they search for a cure for their personal pain, or at least the insight that there is no cure for the wound.
He first visited East Asia in 1990, and this trip later gave rise to his work Destruction and Sorrow Under the Sky, which can be called a report book rather than an experience account or travelogue…where the questions do not revolve around a specific event, but rather the cause of hopelessness, destruction, and sorrow.
One of his large-scale novels “Baron Wenckheim Returns” (2016) leads back to the beginning of Krasznahorkai’s oeuvre to the novels “Sátántangó” (1985), and “The Melancholy of Resistance” (1989) raise most important questions again, and creates a strong motivic and thematic connection with the texts.
As in both these novels, the pages of “Baron Wenckheim Returns” are focused on the inexorable hopelessness and the futile wait for redemption. It returns to the first novels not only in terms of its themes, but also in terms of its location. The most important setting being the unnamed, yet identifiable small town of Gyula and the surrounding farm world.
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Varga H. Mária
János Horvát is a Hungarian poetess and writer. She writes under pen name Varga H. Mária (Varga – her birth name, and that continues as her family name.) She is interested in literature and reading since she was a child. Although her parents were manual workers but they instilled in her love of books. So, after their hard work, and whenever they had some free time, they always had a book in their hands.
Hence, Varga H. Mária says, “Writing is such that when inspiration strikes, you have to put it down on paper immediately. At least the gist of it.” Therefore, her desk is always full of little notes of paper, with lots of topics to write something. Now, she is approaching seventy, and as a pensioner, she has more time for her favorite occupation. So, she tells, “Whether it is morning or night, but in the quiet hours of the evening her Muse is also more willing to guide her pen.”
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