Hungary’s Laszlo Krasznahorkai wins Nobel literature prize

Stockholm: The Nobel Prize in Literature was on Thursday awarded to Laszlo Krasznahorkai, considered by many as Hungary’s most important living author whose works explore themes of postmodern dystopia and melancholy.

The Swedish Academy honoured him “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

Krasznahorkai, 71, is “a great epic writer in the Central European tradition that extends through Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and is characterised by absurdism and grotesque excess,” the jury said in a statement.

“But there are more strings to his bow, and he also looks to the East in adopting a more contemplative, finely calibrated tone.”

Krasznahorkai was among those mentioned as a possible winner in the run-up to the prize.

Last year, the award went to South Korean author Han Kang, the first Asian woman to win the Nobel.

The Academy has long been criticised for the overrepresentation of Western white men among its picks.

Women are vastly under-represented among its laureates - just 18 out of 122 since it was first awarded in 1901.

The Swedish Academy has undergone major reforms since a devastating MeToo scandal in 2018, vowing a more global and gender-equal literature prize.

The Nobel Prize comes with a diploma, a gold medal and a $1.2 million prize sum.

Krasznahorkai will receive the award from King Carl XVI Gustaf in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist and prize creator Alfred Nobel.

Krasznahorkai has been described as the postmodern “master of the apocalypse”.

“He is a hypnotic writer,” Krasznahorkai’s English language translator, the poet George Szirtes, told AFP.

“He draws you in until the world he conjures echoes and echoes inside you, until it’s your own vision of order and chaos”.

Until now, the late Holocaust survivor Imre Kertesz was the only Hungarian to win the Nobel literature prize, who in 2002 was honoured “for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history”.

Born in Gyula, a small town in southeast Hungary in 1954, Krasznahorkai, now 71, grew up in a middle-class Jewish family.

He has drawn inspiration from his experiences under communism, and the extensive travels he undertook after first moving abroad in 1987 to West Berlin for a fellowship.

His novels, short stories and essays are best known in Germany - where he lived for long periods - and Hungary, where he is considered by many as the country’s most important living author.

Critically difficult and demanding, his style was described once by Krasznahorkai himself as “reality examined to the point of madness”.

His penchant for long sentences and few paragraph breaks have also seen the writer labelled as “obsessive”.

Exploring themes of postmodern dystopia and melancholy, his first novel “Satantango” (1985) brought him to prominence in Hungary and remains his best-known work.

Recounting life in a decaying village in communist-era Hungary, its uncompromising style (12 chapters each consisting of a single paragraph) was called by its translator Szirtes as “a slow lava-flow of narrative”.

The book was for people who “want something other than entertainment... who have a preference for the painfully beautiful,” Krasznahorkai said in a interview.

“Satantango” was made into a feature film - lasting more than seven hours - of the same name in 1994 by the acclaimed Hungarian director Bela Tarr.

Tarr also brought to the screen an adaptation of the writer’s 1989 novel “The Melancholy of Resistance”, also set in a desolate communist-era location, in his 2000 film “Werckmeister Harmonies”.

Variously compared to Irish writer Samuel Beckett and Russia’s Fyodor Dostoyevsky, late American critic Susan Sontag called Krasznahorkai “the contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse who inspires comparison with Gogol and Melville”.

His “War and War” novel (1999) was described by the New Yorker magazine critic James Wood as “one of the most profoundly unsettling experiences I have ever had as a reader”.

“I felt that I had got as close as literature could possibly take me to the inhabiting of another person,” Wood wrote.

In 2015, Krasznahorkai won Britain’s Booker Prize for career achievement, and said he hoped it would allow him to access a wider audience.

The first Hungarian author to receive that award, he credited author Franz Kafka, singer Jimi Hendrix and the city of Kyoto in Japan for inspiration.

“I hope that with the help of this prize I will find new readers in the English-speaking world,” he told AFP after receiving the award.

Asked about the apocalyptic images in his work, he said: “Maybe I’m a writer who writes novels for readers who need the beauty in hell”.