A01=Laszlo Krasznahorkai
art
Author_Laszlo Krasznahorkai
beauty
bucket list novel
Category=FBA
Category=FYT
circus fiction
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_nobargain
great hungarian novel
hungary
isolation reading
Krasznahorkai
Man International Booker Prize
NOBEL PRIZE 2025
quarantine reading
satantango
Seiobo
The Melancholy of Resistance
viktor orban
War & War
world literature
Product details
- ISBN 9781781256244
- Weight: 276g
- Dimensions: 128 x 196mm
- Publication Date: 12 May 2016
- Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 2025
The Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai's magisterial, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town.
A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumours. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find - music, cosmology, fascism.
The novel's characters are unforgettable: the evil Mrs. Eszter, plotting her takeover of the town; her weakling husband; and Valuska, our hapless hero with his head in the clouds, who is the tender centre of the book, the only pure and noble soul to be found.
Compact, powerful and intense, The Melancholy of Resistance, as its enormously gifted translator George Szirtes puts it, 'is a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type.' And yet, miraculously, the novel, in the words of Guardian, 'lifts the reader along in lunar leaps and bounds.'
Translated by George Szirtes
László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954. He has written 14 novels and won multiple awards including the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2025, the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2019 for Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming, the 2015 Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement and the 2024 Prix Formentor. Several of his most famous novels, including Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance, were turned into films by the director Béla Tarr. His books have been translated into forty-two languages, and his most recent, Herscht 07769, was published in 2024. He lives in the hills of Pilisszentlászló in Hungary.
