Awarding the Nobel prize for literature to László Krasznahorkai today, the Swedish Academy commended the author’s “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”. But in itself their decision is also a commitment to the value of serious and intellectual writing in an age characterised by immediacy, the distractions of digital culture and the entertainment industry.
Krasznahorkai was first propelled into literary fame in Hungary, his home country, with his first novel Satantango (1985), a novel about a squalid, rain-soaked village visited by a mysterious man. He could be a prophet, Satan or merely a con man.
This book established the coordinates for the subsequent series of ambitious novels that cemented Krasznahorkai’s status as one of the great contemporary global writers.
