Satantango

László Krasnahorkai's novel Satantango, first published in Hungary during the dying years of Communism and now newly translated into English by George Szirtes, is a desolate and terrifying vision of a moribund society, shot through with black farce and prophetic satire. The story is this: Irimiás, a mysterious figure until lately believed dead, returns to a dying collective farm whose residents are thinking only of shutting up shop and escaping. Irimiás is part trickster, part devil and part messiah, a charismatic and seemingly unstoppable force who manipulates, swindles and controls the desperate villagers until, between them, they create something that looks very much like hell. With its trickster protagonist, bewildered peasants and savage social critique, Satantango has been compared to Gogol's Dead Souls, but Krasnahorkai's world is bleaker than that of Gogol's provincial conmen and credulous serfs. In astonishingly sinuous prose, gorgeously rendered by Szirtes' supple translation, he anatomizes a broken and impoverished world - a world which seems inexorably to be circling the cosmic plughole.

In the Anglophone world, Krasznohorkai is perhaps best known as the screenwriter, collaborator and muse of the legendary filmmaker Bela Tárr; Satantango, like his later novel The Melancholy of Resistance, were both turned into long, plangent films, the latter as The Werckmeister Harmonies. It's not hard to see how Tárr and Krasznahorkai ended up working together. Both are European artists of the old school, austere and uncompromising, committed to a visionary and terminal beauty which refuses to offer easy consolation or happy endings. Satantango is no easy read (although, with the film clocking in at seven and a half hours, it might be one of the few classic books which is less taxing than the film version), but it repays the effort: once on board Krasznahorkai's dizzying, apocalyptic merry-go-round, it can be very hard to get off.