Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Hungarian novelist known for his dark and apocalyptic themes and complex sentences that can stretch for pages, received the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday.
The Swedish Academy, organizers of the prize, said at a news conference that Krasznahorkai received the prize “for his fascinating and visionary work which, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”
Krasznahorkai (pronounced CRAS-now-hoar-kay), 71, has long been revered by his fellow writers. Susan Sontag once called him the “master of the apocalypse,” and Hungarian director Bela Tarr adapted several of his novels for film.
Tarr filmed “The Melancholy of the Resistance,” which is among Krasznahorkai’s best-known works, under the title “Harmonies Werckmeister,” in 2000. Although Krasznahorkai published “The Melancholy of the Resistance” in Hungarian in 1989, it did not appear in English translation until 1998. The novel, filled with long sentences, concerns the events that occurred in a small Hungarian town after the arrival of a circus with a huge stuffed whale in tow.
His last work published in English is “Herscht 07769”, published last year in the United States. The novel, which imagines a graffiti cleaner in Germany who writes letters to Chancellor Angela Merkel warning her of the world’s impending destruction, features only one period in its 400 pages.
Krasznahorkai told the New York Times in 2014 that he tried to develop an “absolutely original” style, adding: “I wanted to be free to move away from my literary ancestors and not create a new version of Kafka or Dostoyevsky or Faulkner.” »
Steve Sem-Sandberg, a member of the committee that awarded the prize, praised Krasznahorkai’s “powerful and musically inspired epic style” at the press conference announcing the Nobel.
“It is Krasznahorkai’s artistic eye, completely devoid of illusions and which sees through the fragility of the social order, combined with his unwavering belief in the power of art that motivated the academy to award this prize,” Sem-Sandberg added.
Krasznahorkai was born in communist Hungary in 1954 to a Jewish family in Gyula, a small town about 200 kilometers from Budapest. His father was a lawyer and his mother worked in the Ministry of Social Welfare.
After school, Krasznahorkai did his military service but, he said in interviews, he deserted the army after being punished for insubordination. He then did odd jobs – including playing piano in a jazz group – and studied Hungarian literature in Budapest.
Krasznahorkai’s literary breakthrough came with his 1985 debut novel, “Satantango,” about life in a poor hamlet, which became a literary sensation in Hungary. (Tarr also filmed an adaptation, which runs more than seven hours, in 1994.)
Over the past decades, he has received numerous accolades outside his home country. In 2015, he won the Man Booker International Prize, which at the time was awarded for an author’s entire body of work rather than a particular novel.
Marina Warner, president of that year’s jury, told reporters that Krasznahorkai was “a visionary writer of extraordinary intensity and vocal range who captures the texture of current existence in scenes that are terrifying, strange, frighteningly comic and often heartbreakingly beautiful.”
The Nobel Prize is the highest literary honor and is usually the cornerstone of a writer’s career. Past recipients include authors Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison, playwright Harold Pinter and, in 2016, Bob Dylan.
The Swedish Academy has tried in recent years to broaden the diversity of authors awarded the prize, after criticism that the vast majority of winners were men from North America or Europe.
Last year’s winner was Han Kang, the South Korean author known for “The Vegetarian,” a surreal novel about a woman who stops eating and tries to live on sunlight. Other recent winners include Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian author whose novels dissect the immigrant experience and the legacy of colonialism, and Annie Ernaux, a French writer whose books detail moments in her life, from everyday to traumatic.
Krasznahorkai had been among the bookmakers’ favorites to win the prize for many years. He is the second Hungarian to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature after Imre Kertész, novelist and Holocaust survivor, in 2002.
