The modernists understood the paradox of the society from which they emerged. Europe, to them, was both new and old, traditional and progressive, and modernist art, too, would be innovative and fresh, yet preoccupied with decay and decline. In the English-speaking world, modernist writing would eventually itself experience the death with which it was obsessed, but in central Europe, strangely, this never happened. Modernism continued to flourish in the last century, spurred on by successive cycles of revolution and tyranny.
László Krasznahorkai is very much of this tradition, writing books that are innovative to a fault, and liveliest when envisioning death. Born in Hungary in 1954, less than a decade after the end of the Nazi occupation his Jewish father survived, he began writing in the 80s as communism collapsed. The decomposition of the body politic may be his central preoccupation, and all his novels are imbued with a premonition of the end of things. Susan Sontag, an early reader, anointed Krasznahorkai “the contemporary master of the apocalypse”.
