Dancing with the devil

“When I am not reading Kafka I am thinking about Kafka. When I am not thinking about Kafka I miss thinking about him..”

Wonderful interview with László Krasznahorkai in The White Review, conducted by poet and translator George Szirtes:

I think readers who already knew Sátántangó, the film by Béla Tarr and myself, and had read The Melancholy of Resistance, War and War and Animalinside were waiting to read this too. And it seems that at the time of publication, Sátántangó was the kind of book many people actually wanted. People who wanted to escape the middle ground of high-formal pyrotechnics and the exhaustingly new; those who were waiting for a book that says something about the world; those who want something other than entertainment, who don’t want to escape from life but to live it over again, to know that they have a life, that they have a part in it, and have a preference for the painfully beautiful. My explanation is that we have no great literature. But readers need it, not as medicine, not as delusion, but because they need someone to tell them there is no medicine.

Adam Thirlwell has written a piece on Krasznahorkai and his unique style which begins:

One evening in October 2010, the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai — a man in his fifties with a biblical look — appeared on the balcony of the Collegium Hungaricum in Berlin, a white modernist building that’s a block north of Unter den Linden. At the same time an image of a dog, in silhouette, was projected from inside the building onto a large window below the balcony. Without introduction or explanation, Krasznahorkai then began to speak. And at first, I suppose that the uninformed commuter in Berlin might have assumed that the monologue this man was pronouncing was in the imaginary voice of the silhouetted dog—stretched out, as if leaping.

Whenever Krasznahorkai paused, in precise synchronization, a new image of the leaping dog’s silhouette was projected onto the window. Meanwhile, Krasznahorkai didn’t acknowledge the people standing below him on the pavement. He simply spoke to the street. As he continued, the nature of this monologue became more violent, threatening apocalypse. To the confused Berliner, it perhaps now seemed more likely that this man was talking not as a dog but as himself, a deranged prophet.