Nobel Prize for Literature in the apocalyptic László Krasznahorkai

BarcelonaThe Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, author of novels such as Satanic Tango –available in Catalan from Edicions del Cràter, translated by Carles Dachs– has just been proclaimed the winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "exciting and visionary work, which, amidst apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art." Krasznahorkai, who was praised by the Swedish Academy this Thursday as one of the heirs "of the burlesque absurdity that ranges from Franz Kafka to Thomas Bernhard," is one of the headliners of the Kosmopolis festival and is scheduled to visit Barcelona on October 24, where he will converse with Mique at the CCCB.

Born in Gyula, a small town in southeastern Hungary, in 1954, Krasznahorkai made his debut as a writer in the mid-1980s with Satanic Tango, after a season devoting himself to one of his great passions, music, graduating in law and moving around various places in the country, doing a wide variety of jobs, including that of "night watchman for cows", as he recalled in an interview with ARA conducted just a year ago in Marrakech on the occasion of the awarding of the Formentor Prize"If they give me the Nobel Prize, I'll use the Formentor Prize as a shield," he said then, with his characteristic mischievous sense of humor.

The world, a place without hope

Satanic Tango was the writer's "first international success," said Mats Malm, secretary of the Swedish Academy. In the late 1980s, Susan Sontag described Krasznahorkai as "the contemporary master of the apocalypse." "The story of Satanic Tango It has often been classified as dystopia, but not because it is set in the future or in a distant reality, but because it sends the reader to a small Hungarian town that lives in a kind of limbo, while it waits for a character who is supposed to be a savior and who, when he arrives, manipulates them into moving to the next town over,” says Mariona Bosch, from Edicions del Crà Krasznahorkai, the first one that can be read in our language. “The world it paints is a place without hope, where people end up trusting someone who tricks them and takes the little money they had managed to accumulate.” The book raised a storm within the Hungarian communist regime, and made it impossible for the author to leave the country until 1987. In the meantime, he continued working on what would be his second novel. Melancholy of resistance (1989, in Spanish in Acantilado, translated by Adan Kovacsics), and also in his first film script.

"I only dedicated myself to cinema because Béla Tarr –he recalled in Marrakech last year–. “Generally, I don’t like the world of cinema very much. It all started on Easter Monday in 1985. While I was still sleeping off my hangover, someone knocked violently on my front door. Who could it be? I wondered. Outside there was a guy in a leather jacket and tight pants, like he was David Bowie. He told me he had just read Satanic Tango, which was banned at the time, and which he had loved. Maybe I should have closed the door on the kids, but I didn't, and he invited me to see his films, which were brilliant. We worked together for almost 25 years, until The Turin Horse (2012), with which he retired." Among Krasznahorkai's scripts for Tarr, also notable are those he wrote for the films Werckmeister's harmonies (2000) and The man from London (2007), the first inspired by Melancholy of resistance, and the second loosely based on a novel by Georges Simenon.

Yeah Satanic Tango It is motivated by the return of two disturbing characters to a town in decline, Melancholy of resistance (1989) is based on the arrival of a ghostly circus to a Carpathian village, one of whose main attractions is the exhibition of a dead whale. "The struggle between order and disorder is one of the main themes of Krasznahorkai's work. Another is contact with the East, present in titles such as And Seiobo descended to Earth [2008; in Spanish in Acantilado], in which he defends the value of art in a world dominated by blindness and banality, explained Mats Malm from the Swedish Academy. In all his books, the writer displays them through interminable sentences that, nevertheless, are read fluently and are often charged with lyrical beauty. "Although Krasznahorkai has stated that writing is, for him, something as enigmatic as 'dancing in mystery once in a while', Sandra Ollo from Acantilado, a publishing house that has published eight of the Hungarian author's titles for more than two decades, acknowledged that readers are interested in writing.

"Krasznahorkai's sentences are of great complexity, which has to do, in part, with the structure of the Hungarian language: to translate what we told him at home Satanic trance I stayed half a year longer than we had planned with Crater,” recalls Carles Dachs, who began reading the Nobel Prize winner for literature during his stay in Budapest as a Catalan lecturer for the Eötvös Loránd University between 2017 and 2021. “When you live in Hungary you realize that the dystopian and apocalyptic world that is always highlighted from the outside is, in reality, a reflection of what is happening in the country.”

If the end of the Soviet regime marked the writer's first novels, the conservative and illiberal policies of Viktor Orbán's more recent titles, such as Baron Wenckheim returns home (2016; in Spanish in Acantilado) and Herscht 07769 (2021). "Both books feature a group of violent young neo-Nazis," he recalled a year ago from Marrakech. Herscht 07769 It's structured in a single 400-page sentence and set in a small town in Thuringia, the German region where the far right has just won the elections. I wrote it a few years ago, but some of the events I describe have turned out to be prophetic." The author also stated, in relation to the darkness of his books: "I'm not a canary in a mine trying to warn anyone of the apocalypse. My song says: 'It's too late to save us, it's too late...' I could say the same about today's Hungary. Thank God, the Hungarian language still survives. If I have a homeland, it's my language."

The Nobel announcement coincided with the imminent publication of a new book by Krasznahorkai in his homeland. "We became interested this summer, and it's a novel with a long, complicated title that we could roughly translate as The security of the Hungarian nation: hunting butterflies –Mariona Bosch says–. At Cráter we would like to continue publishing the author. New releases and also iconic books such as Melancholy of resistance and War and war"It will all depend on whether we can afford the price they ask for."