“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.
