And that’s it for another year! Thank you for joining us for the live blog. You can read the full story by Emma Loffhagen here:
The Nobel peace prize will be announced tomorrow at 10am BST (11am CEST).
“I’ve been haunted by Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance since I first read it in the early years of the century”, says the poet and writer Fiona Sampson. “It’s a work which has the undeniable signature of genius. At the time I was working on seeing writers from what we then called post-communist Europe into publication in English. Even then, in that explosion of access to wonderful writing too long inaudible in the Anglosphere, this fiction stood out.
“The Melancholy of Resistance was the first novel of his I read. I was immediately sucked into its shadowy moodscape. Starting to read this famously unparagraphed novel is like entering a labyrinth: a claustrophobic zone where the mystery of an arriving leviathan (and all that symbolises), of the suffocating small town into which it arrives, not to mention the nocturne which is the setting, all combined almost unbearably in a portrait of powerlessness and society’s failure. A political critique? Almost certainly, but also such a profound and new made symbol it speaks to every kind of stalemate, psychic and societal.
“Krasznahorkai reminds us life is difficult, agency almost always almost out of reach, and the colours of many times and places sombre. An essential read for these times, not least in a Europe once again feeling the squeeze between Russia and the US.”
