Laszlo Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian writer who says the seven-and-a-half-hour movie made on his debut novel “Satantango” is not longer than necessary. “Sometimes a sentence takes time and actually a revolution needs a little more time than seven and a half hours,” says the Hungarian author about his book that was written long ago (1985) but translated only recently (2012).
In an interview full of imagery and poetic texture, Krasznahorkai says, “I like the tango and the dance has a very strange structure…a little forward and a little back…it is interesting to transport this structure into literature because I wanted to show a human community, not a dramatic story or scene but rather a story of human beings and condition and towards this end I did not need a very permanent structure…rather a structure where the reader can go forth and back, forth and back…that was my first and I thought that would be the last…I wanted to write only a book. I did not want to be ‘so good’ a writer, you know…”
If that declaration makes you smile here is more about the unassuming author who studied law and philosophy and in this book has written about the last stages of a crumbling Communist phase. He says he does not see himself as a political writer and what he set out to do was, “...in that time a beautiful sentence was enough to be provocative and I wanted to write only beautiful sentences…but,” says Krasznahorkai almost apologetically, and a little enigmatically, that the publishing of this book was a possibility, a reality which his friends and he could never understand because the book had nothing of what the Communist party loves. Nobody understood why and how this book got through.
Krasznahorkai tells us how he managed to write about adultery abuse, poverty prostitution and the rest of it. “I lived in the countryside of Hungary and I stood for long times in different bars, in different stations. I changed my location every three, six months… I am living under a cloud, a cloud of sadness. If I move right the cloud moves with me, if I move left it moves with me. So I feel everything is sad, even the rain and the shine. Of course in some places people may live without the cloud, but it is my fate to live with it.”
Wrapped as his text is in sadness, imagery, contradictions and emotions jostle along in a single line like the one quoted below:
“He gazed sadly at the threatening sky, at the burned-out remnants of a locust-plagued summer, and suddenly saw on the twig of an acacia, as in a vision, the progress of spring, summer, fall and winter, as if the whole of time were a frivolous interlude in the much greater spaces of eternity, a brilliant conjuring trick to produce something orderly apparently out of chaos, establish a vantage point from which chance might begin to look like necessity…and he saw himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin, painfully trying to tear his body away only, eventually, to deliver himself…utterly naked, without identifying mark, stripped down to essentials…into the care of the people whose duty it was to wash the corpses, people obeying an order snapped out in the dry air against a background loud with torturers and flayers of skin, where he was obliged to regard the human condition without a trace of pity, without a single possibility of any way back to life, because by then he would know for certain that all his life he had been playing with cheaters who had marked the cards and who would in the end, strip him of even his last means of defence, of that hope of someday finding his way back home.”
That may well read like a paragraph, but Krasznakorai says it is a sentence, long not because of his training in philosophy but because, “I lived with people who wanted to show they had not lost their dignity…Hungarian language is a very fragile language like the language of a hidden prince…if you want to say something very suggestive…it becomes long…I have used spoken language…where the wish is to convince people.”
sudhamahi@gmail.com
