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.