Worth three-decade wait

After a locust-ridden summer, and on the brink of torrential autumn rains, there is a sense of pause. Everything is clad in spider-web, and held fast, but the spiders themselves are rarely seen. The remaining locals have a little money from cattle sales and are theoretically planning their escape. But in this purgatory of lust, distrust, constant in-fighting and self-serving revisionism, routine is everything, and all they truly desire is a return to the way things used to be.

To people in need of salvation, the bells are a harbinger, announcing the imminent arrival of something either godly or, more likely, its antithesis: two men, the messianic Irimiás and his sidekick Petrina, both believed dead, have been sighted nearby. At night, the villagers gather in a local bar, to argue, discuss, drink, and shed their inhibitions through a distinctively demonic dance step, a kind of satanic tango. Irimiás, they want to believe, will change their lives and rescue their world from the abyss. But whispered rumours cling to him, suggesting he’d been an informer, in collusion with the powers that be, or a money-grabbing conman, or something immeasurably, unspeakably worse. One thing is clear: he has plans for them. And, when tragedy strikes, they are fodder for his feast.

Hungary’s László Krasznahorkai ought to rank highly on any list of the world’s greatest writers. Satantango, the latest of his apocalyptic novels to have made it into an English translation, is in fact his début work, first published in 1985. Yet this is no piece of juvenilia; rather, the author seems to have hit the literary scene already fully formed, with all his remarkable gifts set firmly in place. Satantango not only stands comfortably beside his other offerings, the highly regarded War & War and the dense, hallucinatory masterpiece, The Melancholy of Resistance, it can probably be considered his most accessible novel, and would seem the place to start for anyone keen to familiarise themselves with this unique artistic voice.

Divided in neat halves across 12 claustrophobic, single-paragraph chapters that count up to six and then down again to one, the story is allowed to unfold slowly, through multiple points of view. The result is an uneasy and sensational read.

Admirably translated by the poet, George Szirtes, the almost three-decade wait for this vital work of European literature to make its English-language appearance is a small travesty that has finally been put right.

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