Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai's bold experiments with long sentences

Considering Krasznahorkai’s experiments with the Hungarian language, it must be notoriously tough to render his work into English. Even so, his novels have reached Anglophone readers due to the efforts of his translators, George Szirtes, Ottillie Mulzet and John Batki. In spite of the undeniable greatness of his work—I use the term here with the full awareness of its weight—his books will appeal only to a niche, and that is of a piece with who he is, both as a writer and human being.

For the vast majority, Krasznahorkai’s novels are obtuse, a test of their patience. And not only is the writer aware of this effect, he also owns it with equanimity. In a Paris Review interview with Adam Thirwell in 2018, he spoke of the distinction of his novels in no uncertain terms. “Occasionally a very high-level literary work happens to say something on the midrange level and reaches more readers," he put it. “My novels absolutely don’t work on the mid-level because I don’t ever compromise."

In India, Krasznahorkai’s work gained currency among select readers in 2013, when the writer visited the country for the first time to participate in the Almost Island Dialogues, an annual literary convention curated by poet, writer and translator Sharmistha Mohanty, who is also the publisher of an online magazine of the same name. Mohanty had previously interviewed the reclusive writer during a trip to Budapest which was published in Almost Island magazine. In the course of that long conversation, Krasznahorkai had spoken of his life under Soviet rule, the many odd jobs he did along the years, including working as a miner and nightwatchman for 300 cows, and his relationship with the Hungarian language.

Speaking of the latter, Krasznahorkai pointed out that Hungarian being just 200 years old, can withstand bolder experiments that, say, western European languages with long and august histories. He also offered a remarkable and profound explanation for his long sentences. For him, Krasznahorkai said, the sentence is a unit of thought. Even one that only has a few words, therefore, could feel impossibly long if it makes the reader think for a long time. So, the length of his sentence is, for Krasznahorkai, a philosophical choice rather than a matter of stylistic virtuosity. As he said in the Paris Review interview, “If you want to say something very important… you don’t need full stops or periods but breaths and rhythm—rhythm and tempo and melody."

As a student of literature, I was trained to read and appreciate the sentence—the long and the short of it. I wrote my graduate thesis on the novels of Henry James, another writer famous for his serpentine sentences. I loved Virginia Woolf’s novels, which are minefields of complex sentences. I read Ulysses, a novel where language breaks down into pure thought, but I gave up on James Joyce after a brush with Finnegans Wake. My 20-something self may not have always survived the force field of the long sentence, but thankfully my 40-something self is better fortified to face it, considering I read Krasznahorkai’s first novel, Satantango (1985), recently with rapt attention.

To be honest, I was surprised by the degree of my absorption in the world Krasznahorkai builds in the book. Each chapter consists of a single, seemingly endless paragraph. At a glance, it looks like the reader is confronting a brick wall, but once the eye starts moving over the words, they begin to see life forms trembling, moving, breathing in the interstices of the letters. I had anticipated my smartphone-haunted brain to put up a resistance against this parade of words, but I was startled by the ease with which Krasznahorkai drew me in. Once I entered his dark, dank, apocalyptic rural dystopia, I didn’t want to lose the thread of his thought.