Jacob Silverman

Some Krasznahorkai Links

My review of Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s Satantango is in this weekend’s New York Times Book Review, so I thought I’d put together a list of links about the author and the novel.

• BBC World interview with George Szirtes, Krasznahorkai’s English translator, talking about the author’s work and his collaborations with Bela Tarr.
• At The Quarterly Conversation, David Auerbach’s essay, “The Mythology of Laszlo Krasznahorkai,” discussing the novels The Melancholy of Resistance and War and War.
• “Something Is Burning Outside,” part of The Guardian’s series of short stories marking the fall of the Berlin Wall. This one is set at an artists’ retreat.
• At Hungarian Literature Online, an interview with Barbara Epler, New Directions editor-in-chief, about publishing Krasznahorkai, literature in translation, and Bolaño.
• Hungarian Quarterly’s interview with Krasznahorkai, in which he says that the Bible’s gotten bad PR and that he “can’t watch movies” (this despite the fact that he’s written screenplays for many of Bela Tarr’s films). Offers a good sense of his sensibility and his life in the Hungarian countryside.

The Devil They Know

I reviewed Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s Satantango for this weekend’s New York Times Book Review.

“Satantango,” the latest novel by the Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai to be translated into English, takes place over a few rain-sodden days in a dying hamlet. The local estate has been closed, its animals hocked, its mill shut down. Perhaps a dozen residents remain. Like the surrounding buildings, they are rife with rot.

As in much of Krasznahorkai’s work, a sense of hallucinatory conspiracy is in the air. People speak ominously, if vaguely, about what lies ahead. They see visions and hear bells they can’t place. “If they read the papers properly,” one character says, “they would know that there is a real crisis out there.”

Read the rest here.

I talked to Hari Kunzru about the culture wars, traveling around the Mojave Desert, his decision to read from The Satanic Verses at the Jaipur Literary Festival, and his new novel, Gods Without Men, which is reviewed on the cover of this Sunday’s NYTBR. You can read my story at Capital New York.

For The Quarterly Conversation, I wrote about Lars Iyer and his novels Spurious and Dogma. Here’s one thing I had to say:

Iyer has written scabrous philosophical comedies about two men—W., a moderately successful writer and intellectual, and his layabout failure of a friend, Lars Iyer. The plots follow their delirious, often drunken, conversations about life, religion, and the end of the world (which they believe is soon approaching). They’re like two very well read David Mamet characters, skydiving without parachutes and laughing all the way down.

I talked to Adam Wilson, whose very funny debut novel, Flatscreen, is out now. You can read my profile of Wilson at Capital New York.

For The National, I reviewed Krys Lee’s short story collection, Drifting House.

I went to see Belinda McKeon and Colm Tóibín at The Center for Fiction and wrote about it for Capital New York.

Over at Bookforum, I reviewed The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky.

Certain writers are too weird to fully belong to their own time. Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky—a Soviet writer obsessed with Kant and Shakespeare, whose own life barely rippled beyond a small coterie of Muscovite writers before his death in 1950—is among them. Krzhizhanovsky wrote philosophical works of fiction that veer between chattiness and, in the fine translations of Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov, unexpected elegance. They are tales of bodies suspended between life and death, of an animated Eiffel Tower that rampages across Europe, and of towns where dreams are made literal. To read these stories is to be buttonholed by a slightly mad but unfailingly interesting stranger desperate for a sympathetic ear. In Krzhizhanovsky, we find the aphorisms of a dime store philosopher and the polyphony of a schizophrenic.

Read the rest here.