László Krasznahorkai
Translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes
A powerful, surreal novel, in the tradition of Gogol, about the chaotic events surrounding a mysterious circus' arrival in a small Hungarian town. "This is a book about a world into which the Leviathan has returned. The universality of its vision rivals that of Gogol's Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing." -W. G. Sebald
The Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai's magisterial, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in an insignificant Hungarian town. A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the midst of a terminal frost, prompting bizarre rumors. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose at hand, 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 center 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 The Guardian, "lifts the reader along in lunar leaps and bounds."
László Krasznahorkai lives reclusively in the hills of Szentlászló. He has written five novels and won numerous prizes, including Best Book of the Year in Germany in 1993 for The General Theseus. . George Szirtes is a poet who was born in Budapest in 1948 and is now living in London. His translations have won The European Translation Prize and the Gold Star Award for the Republic of Hungary.