"I'm sure you've all wondered at some point how to pronounce my friend László's surname," began translator and writer Adan Kovacsics, with a friendly smile, sitting next to the latest Nobel laureate in literature. "I have the answer," he continued. "It has to be separated into two parts, kraszna and horkaiIt is a word of Slavic origin: krasny It means pretty, and horkai, hill." The "pretty hill" that is László Krasznahorkai He was also smiling on Wednesday night at the CCCB while his friend assured everyone that the work of the author of Satanic Tango and Melancholy of resistance It connects with great classics like Dostoevsky and Kafka and broadens the spectrum of the contemporary novel thanks to its demanding nature, both in form and content.

The joy with which László Krasznahorkai (Gyula, 1954) received the news of the Nobel Prize in Literature last October, which was quickly tinged with anguish. "Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk to me: they congratulated me, asked for interviews, even though many of those journalists had never read me, and I even received a letter from the town where I was born inviting me to pay for a new wooden bridge they needed," he recalls in Barcelona, ​​months later. "All I wanted was to disappear," he insists. He couldn't make that dream a reality until January, shortly after delivering his Nobel lecture in Stockholm, in which, starting from the desire to address "hope," he ended up recounting a personal anecdote from the Berlin subway in the early 1990s: a homeless man appeared, struggling to urinate in a corner, and, unaware of his infraction, was chased after to stop him.

Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, a master of European cinema, has died at the age of seventy, a premature age (especially at a time when some of the world's despots, like Putin and Xi Jinping, converse before the Forbidden City about the age-old chimera of immortality, so beloved by tyrants). Tarr's cinema is lyrical and stark, visually hypnotic, and narratively characterized by a masterful command of ellipsis and off-screen space. His stories often appear to be almost non-stories, barely formulated situations. But from minimal elements, his films offer a harsh yet compassionate perspective on humanity and the world.

The Nobel Prize acceptance speech for literature by by László Krasznahorkai (Gyula, Hungary, 1954) has been a call and a warning. The writer of titles such as Satanic Tango (Ediciones del Cráter, 2025) and Melancholy of resistance (Acantilado, 2001) has said that we must be vigilant "about these new angels without wings," among whom he cited billionaire Elon Musk. "With their insane plans, they are taking over people's space and time," Krasznahorkai warned. The writer's intention was to dedicate the speech to hope, but he was forced to change it given the evidence that "the reserves of hope had been completely exhausted." Krasznahorkai has used the term new angels to refer to people who "walk among us dressed in street clothes and appear unsettlingly here and there, in all kinds of situations in our lives."

In its thirteenth edition, the Kosmopolis festival has set out to focus on what is seemingly marginal and peripheral and place it at the center. Hence, three of its axes are comics, South Korean literature, and creation in Galician. "If we make the effort to move away from the comfort of the center, we will have the opportunity to discover new names and recognize their talent," says Elisabet Goula, director of the festival, which will be held from October 22 to 26 at the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB) and will feature ninety artists from around the world, such as Spiegelman, Charles Burns, and Chris Ware; novelists such as Isabella Hammad, Sigrid Nunez, Kim Hye-hin, José Eduardo Agualusa and Miquel de Palol; poets such as Ismael Ramos and Blanca Luz Vidal; essayists such as Didier Eribon and Kapka Kassabova, and filmmakers such as Carla Simón.

In a time and world dominated by algorithms and the pathological desire to accumulate money, a time that generates a word as frightening as monetizeThe awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to the Hungarian László Krasznahorkai has pleased those who still want—we still want—to believe in literature as a place of resistance. Resistance against what or whom, you might ask? Well, resistance against charlatans and charlatans. Against cynics, impostors, opportunists. Of course, against authoritarians and champions of false freedoms.

[We are republishing this interview conducted in Marrakech on September 27, 2024, on the occasion of the 2024 Formentor Prize]