“I was night watchman for three hundred cows. That was my favourite – a byre in no man’s land. There was no village, no city, no town nearby. I was a watchman for a few months, maybe. A poor life with Under the Volcano in one pocket and Dostoyevsky in the other.” This is László Krasznahorkai, speaking to The Paris Review in 2018. A watchman for three hundred cows! A life made only of silently observing the most obvious. With any other writer, this might have been a state of despair – perched somewhere between Dostoevskian puzzlement and bovine bawling. For Krasznahorkai, it became a vantage point from which to peer into the void – a position from which he sculpted his profound ruminations on the banality of the apocalypse.

Difficult and demanding as Krasznahorkai’s writing is, the Nobel Prize for Literature was never a question of if but when. In the last decade, he had scooped up nearly all the major awards in Europe, including the Best Translated Book Awards in 2013 and 2014 and the Man Booker International Prize, which placed him in the ranks of Ismail Kadare, Philip Roth, Chinua Achebe and Alice Munroe.

But since winning the Nobel, Krasznahorkai – famously reticent, often speaking in monosyllables to his friends – has become surrounded by noise. Rapturous applause. Everyone now wants him to speak; to add to the clamour already engulfing the studious, oceanic silence we pursue in his fiction. To read Krasznahorkai, frankly, one must be obsessed with being silent, with removing oneself from the holy babble that has become our daily life.

Consider one of the early – typically ‘Krasznahorkaian’ – sentences from The Melancholy of Resistance, his novel about a taxidermied, monstrously large dead whale, a Leviathan, appearing as a portentum in a dreary, forlorn Hungarian village sometime in the last decades of the previous century:

“To tell the truth, none of this really surprised anyone anymore since rail travel, like everything else, was subject to the prevailing conditions: all normal expectations went by the board and one’s daily habits were disrupted by a sense of ever spreading all-consuming chaos, which rendered the future unpredictable, the past unrecallable, and ordinary life so haphazard that people simply assumed that whatever could be imagined might come to pass, that if there were only one door in a building it would no longer open, that wheat would grow head downwards into the earth and not out of it, and that, since one could only note the symptoms of disintegration, the reasons for it remaining unfathomable and inconceivable, there was nothing anyone could do except to get a tenacious grip on everything that was still tangible; which is precisely what people at the village station continued to do when, in hope of taking possession of the essentially limited seating to which they were entitled, they stormed the carriage doors, which being frozen up, proved very difficult to open.”

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This is not difficult writing for the sake of difficulty, for anyone wondering about this sentence. Instead, it is the sort of literature that conjures, molecule by molecule, an entire world encapsulated in the otherwise mundane trifle of a decrepit railway station, pin-stuck to the grey map of Mitteleuropa.

One may, of course, choose to remain disaffected by what the Hungarian Krasznahorkai – or the German W.G. Sebald, the Chilean Roberto Bolaño, the Ukrainian-Brazilian Clarice Lispector, the Portuguese António Lobo Antunes, the Italian Antonio Moresco, or the Romanian Mircea Cartarescu (and, I dare say, Salman Rushdie) – have done or are doing to fiction as both a paean to, and a combatant of, the great modernists: Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Broch, Musil, Camus, Calvino, Márquez. They are staging a coup against the muddle of mediocrity that is fiction otherwise.

After all, we generally prefer fiction that tells us everything, including what it is not telling or showing. That pleases us, comforts us, helps us find closure, because we like to talk about totalities, about clearly laid, lighted pathways from beginning to end. László’s fiction – the rain-drenched immobility of Sátántangó, the banality of horror in The Melancholy of Resistance, the bending of time in War and War, the return of Dostoevsky's Idiot in Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming – instead asks us to participate in a heightened, immersive sensorium of which it is also a part; an interrogation that is also its existential nous, its reason for being, and in which the causes are enmeshed in the chaos, not standing on ceremony.

To read him, we must be silent inside, so that we can hear worlds and words convulse into one another. For those who have read him, this is writing that would not please or gratify our voluble and comfort-seeking senses, nor help us avoid partaking in the chaos of everyday life. As the leading translation journal Asymptote said in an undated interview (probably 2019/2020), Krasznahorkai considers the dot “an artificial border between sentences”. His stories of dystopian ruin unspool in sweeping sentences that “take you down loops and dark alleyways […] like wandering in and out of cellars”, sentences that “like a lint roll, pick up all sorts of odd and unexpected things”, sentences that advance so methodically and insistently that one hardly registers their shifting gears.

Also read: The Charm of Fiction

That, ironically, makes Krasznahorkai’s fiction much closer to our lives than fiction of this kind is ever thought to be, carrying in its bones the marks of late modernity and the Beckettian antipathy Mitteleuropa (Central Europe) has been staring at since the fall of communism.

Krasznahorkai’s work is also a reminder that the world merely pretends to be a happy place anymore, because bare life, bodies stripped of all concealments – Estike in Sátántangó, Valuska in The Melancholy of Resistance, Baron Béla in Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming – are attuned to a form of deep melancholy bordering on an apocalypse that seems to have grown into the bone. They are beyond rewilding. Krasznahorkai’s work is hence not about a dystopia of the future or in some alternate space, but an unannounced, uninvited, unobtrusive arrival of it that has gone unrecorded. It is hence a vision; a sort of commodious imagination that, perhaps, only literature can still invoke (or perhaps Béla Tarr).

No one can say what will happen to him from here, but this Nobel is an assertion that there is still a cap or two left to be doffed at a literature that holds language as sacredly, as strongly, as stoically as Michelangelo’s Pietà holds Jesus in her embrace. We might as well invoke Albert Camus’s famous Nobel acceptance speech, which concluded, “Each generation doubtless feels called to remake the world. Mine knows that it will not remake it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists of preventing the world from destroying itself.” Perhaps – just perhaps – to partake in the apocalypse of Krasznahorkai’s work will help us be saved from actually living through one, unless, of course, we already are.

The writer teaches literature and cinema at Krea University, Sri City.

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