Satantango László Krasznahorkai

Satantango László Krasznahorkai Translated by George Szirtes & Ottilie Mulzet

Krasznahorkai’s extraordinary first novel is back – and more devilish than ever

In the darkening embers of a Communist utopia, life in a desolate Hungarian town has come to a virtual standstill. Flies buzz, spiders weave, water drips and animals root desultorily in the barnyard of a collective farm.

But when the charismatic Irimias – long-thought dead – returns, the villagers fall under his spell. Irimias sets about swindling the villagers out of a fortune that might allow them to escape the emptiness and futility of their existence. He soon attains a messianic aura as he plays on the fears of the townsfolk and a series of increasingly brutal events unfold.

Fiction £9.99 B-format paperback ISBN: 978 1 78816 635 5 304pp eISBN: 978 1 78816 636 2 June 2020 UK Com ex Can

20 László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954. He has written five novels and won numerous prizes, including the Best Translated Book Award in Fiction, twice, the International Booker Prize in 2015 for his oeuvre, and the 2019 National Book Award for his final novel, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming.

A newly revised and expanded translation of Krasznahorkai’s great early novel, on which Béla Tarr’s epic film of the same name was based

‘A modern masterpiece that manages to speak both of its time and to transcend it altogether’ Sunday Telegraph