The last time I saw László Krasznahorkai, he declared his love for me. Admittedly, he was making a rhetorical point about his singular prose style, and we were speaking in front of an audience at an art gallery, but it still felt good. Krasznahorkai is the author of an extraordinary body of fiction, which has made him one of Hungary’s most prominent writers and a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize. His collaborations with the filmmaker Béla Tarr have brought the bleak, existentially freighted atmosphere of his early work to cinema audiences around the world. His narratives consist of single unbroken sentences that seem to have an almost infinite flexibility, swerving from labyrinthine philosophical musings to earthy humor. In his opinion, experiences such as love—particularly love that has taken time and courage to express—cannot be contained in short phrases. The full stop, he has said in the past, “belongs to God,” and the flow of his writing has a profound humanism. It isn’t the fragmented interiority of the old modernist “stream of consciousness,” but a kind of all-encompassing curiosity about the world, which carries the reader along in its current.
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