“The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance,” wrote the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges. “To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes!” Borges’s solution was to pretend that the ideas that attracted him had already been turned into books, which he then reviewed. One of the byproducts of this approach was a gallery of imaginary literary oddballs who had supposedly written the invented works. Most famous is Pierre Menard, who immerses himself in 17th-century literature and somehow produces a verbatim version of Don Quixote. There’s also Mir Bahadur Ali, who writes a detective novel that mashes up Wilkie Collins and 12th-century Islamic theology. And let’s not forget the crazed playwright Herbert Quain, or Carlos Daneri, who intends to write a poem about absolutely everything in the world and gets as far as versifying “nearly a mile of the course run by the River Ob, a gasworks to the north of Veracruz, the leading shops in the Buenos Aires parish of Concepcion ... and a Turkish baths establishment not far from the well-known Brighton Aquarium”.
It’s hard not to feel that the acclaimed Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai would slot in nicely to this fictional pantheon. Born in 1954, he has described his own work as “reality examined to the point of madness”. He’s fond of inveighing against the tyranny of the full stop. In an interview with this paper in 2012, he explained that he was inspired to begin his dark masterpiece, Satantango, during a spell spent helping to castrate piglets at a collective farm.
Even Krasznahorkai’s admirers acknowledge Satantango is a hard and gloomy slog – the Tough Mudder of modern novels. The seven-and-a-half hour black and white film version, directed by Béla Tarr, doesn’t make many more concessions to its viewers. The book is about a set of characters in rural Hungary, but frustrates the reader’s expectations of conventional plot and – spoiler alert! – concludes with one of the characters sitting down and writing the opening pages of the novel word for word. This may be dismaying for readers who have waded through the book in the hope of a pay-off and find themselves trapped instead in a diabolical Möebius strip.
Above all, the defining characteristic of Krasznahorkai’s work is its use of extraordinarily long sentences, sometimes an entire chapter in length. Full of digressions, negations and repetitions, they were described by his first translator George Szirtes as “a slow lava-flow of narrative”. Colm Tóibín has called them “ a tense high-wire act” that mirrors “the enquiring mind at work, thinking, analysing, noticing, remembering, sensing, contradicting, reflecting”. In an admiring review in these pages, Hari Kunzru wrote: “Krasznahorkai throws down a challenge: raise your game or get your coat.”
I’ve never seen the point of the virtuoso long sentence for its own sake. Writing them takes some focus and ingenuity, but so does playing the wobble board. “No iron can enter the human heart as icily as a full stop placed at the right moment,” wrote the Soviet short-story writer Isaac Babel – a master of concision and understatement.
Appearing in English for the first time in an elegant translation by Ottilie Mulzet, this 2003 short novel A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East is probably the most accessible entry point for a newcomer to Krasznahorkai’s work. It could be thought of as a complementary piece to Satantango. Teeming with knavish characters, Satantango is set in a grim late Communist rural hellscape. A Mountain to the North is a sparsely populated piece of writing that unfolds in the tranquillity of a monastery in Kyoto, a place that seems to have been purged of the messy business of living, where “questions having to do with human beings no longer arose”.
As with other works by Krasznahorkai, plot, character and motivation are secondary to the exhaustingly long sentences, whose repetitions and reformulations obscure the incidents and objects the book describes and and render them more vague. A summary inevitably overstates the energy and purposefulness of the narrative, but the story is roughly this: a man arrives by train in Kyoto. He appears to be the descendant of a famous character in the 11th-century Japanese novel, The Tale of Genji, though that’s clearly not possible. He’s feeling a little unwell. He’s shaken off his retinue and has gone looking for a secret garden, concealed somewhere in a temple.
Amid the detailed description of the temple and its otherworldly tranquility are some jarring notes. There’s a rabid fox, a beaten dog seeking solace in the roots of a gingko tree, and a statue of Buddha that, far from radiating compassion to all beings, seems to share the author’s sense of cosmic gloom: “The Buddha turned his beautiful gaze away so that he would not have to look, so he would not have to see, so he would not have to be aware of what was in front of himself, in the three directions – this wretched world.” The presiding mood of existential hopelessness recalls both Satantango and the epigraph of Krasznahorkai’s novel War and War: “Heaven is sad.”
As the book meanders along, it gradually begins to dawn on the reader that what Krasznahorkai has really constructed in this novel is a world full of reflections of his own fanatical craftsmanship. The obsessive description of the temple echoes the meticulousness of Krasznahorkai’s prose, which ushers the reader along the walkways of its overbearing logic. The felling of trees for the temple’s construction and the processing of paper for the “unparalleled masterworks” of the sutras are described in eyewatering detail. Wherever in this world Krasznahorkai gazes he sees versions of his own artistic struggle: indefatigable, challenging, and seemingly intended to sail over the heads of its readers. At the core of the temple, there is the mysterious secret garden of hinoki trees that expresses “the infinitely simple via infinitely complex forces”. The trees, we’re told, contain a message “which no one shall ever understand – for its comprehension was, very visibly, not intended for human beings”.
In the heart of the monastery, not far from the garden that may or may not exist, is the most Borgesian twist of all. In a strangely disordered room that reeks of whisky, we find a work by another invented writer. It’s a French book about mathematics called The Infinite Mistake by the not-very-French-sounding Sir Wilford Stanley Gilmore. We get a whole chapter on this crazy, foul-mouthed, bad-tempered, unreadable book, written by a man who, Krasznahorkai tells us, “trusted none of his readers, looked upon them with contempt, had no wish for them, and considered them worth nothing, as well as not believing in the least that anyone would ever come along who would read his book to the end”.
The judges who awarded Krasznahorkai the 2015 Man Booker International prize said he was a “visionary writer of extraordinary intensity”. I knew him previously only by reputation and was fascinated to see what merited such praise. It’s not beyond me to imagine that there are readers who want to surrender to the strangeness of his prose, the long, self-cancelling sentences and the obsessive descriptions. My view is that 100 years after Ulysses and The Waste Land, his writing is a belated tribute act to modernism that perpetuates its worst traits: obscurity, self-referentiality, lazy pessimism and lack of empathy with the lives of non-academic readers. Of all the mirrors of Krasznahorkai’s art that he places in the book, The Infinite Mistake strikes me as the truest. Despite its encyclopaedic density, A Mountain to the North… is uninterested in – and perhaps even repelled by – the relationships, love, toil, conflicts, needs and interactions of ordinary people. Only in its relative brevity does the book indirectly acknowledge that human lives are fleeting and precious.
A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East by László Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, is published by Tuskar Rock (£15). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
