I had all kinds of reasons for wanting to like this book. First, my daughter gave it to me for Christmas; she spent enough years in the book business to know what might appeal to me. And she was right: I had read a review that made the book sound right up my alley—something dark, apocalyptic, Poe-ish. (I love Poe.) So I embraced the reading of it with relish.
I have to say, though, that the novel disappointed me. László Krasznahorkai‘s Satantango is a dystopian amorality play. Never mind the human figures in it: the main characters are howling wind, brutal rain, mud, and decay. I use the term “figures” for the people in Satantango because the author doesn’t aspire to make them individuals; each one is merely an emanation of main characters, those chaotic forces of nature; these emanations arise and sink back into their elements in single blocks of prose unrelieved by paragraph breaks. The story, such as it is, promises revelation but doesn’t deliver it, delivering instead a fatalistic circle. This circularity is nothing like the famous circularity of Finnegans Wake, which is a hilarious, flourishing, deeply erotic book. Satantango is anti-Eros (as the title hints), the author’s considerable inventiveness and skill at making long, breathtaking sentences wasted on quasi-symbolic figures who inspire only antipathy.
Now, I’m not an idiot. Susan Sontag admired Krasznahorkai; the estimable James Wood claims that the author is a “visionary.” The book has inspired a 7-hour-plus film by Hungarian director Béla Tarr. There could well be something I’m missing. And I can only admire how the excellent Hungarian-born British poet George Szirtes leverages his own talents to bring over into English sentences like this, in which we are introduced to the thinking of a personage known only as the Doctor:
His imagination was bewitched almost to the point of paralysis by the notion that this estate with its rich, generous soil was, only a few million years ago, covered by the sea … that it had alternated between sea and dry land, and suddenly—even as he conscientiously noted down the stocky, swaying figure of Schmidt in his soggy quilted jacket and boots heavy with mud appearing on the path from Szikes, hurrying as if he feared being spotted, sliding in through the back door of his house—he was lost in successive waves of time, coolly aware of the minimal speck of his own being, seeing himself as the defenseless, helpless victim of the earth’s crust, the brittle arc of his life between birth and death caught up in the dumb struggle between surging seas and rising hills, and it was as if he could already feel the gentle tremor beneath the chair supporting his bloated body, a tremor that might be the harbinger of seas about to break in on him, a pointless warning to flee before its all-encompassing power made escape impossible, and he could see himself running, part of a desperate, terrified stampede comprising stags, bears, rabbits, deer, rats, insects and reptiles, dogs and men, just so many futile, meaningless lives in common, incomprehensible devastation, while above them flapped clouds of birds, dropping in exhaustion, offering the only possible hope.
This sentence is an extreme example, but the book is full of similar passages, at once headlong and bogged down in introspection. As much as I admire the sheer skill of it, Krasznahorkai’s style doesn’t compensate for a vision that is bleaker than Beckett‘s, a more or less humorless version of Kafka. It’s as if Faulkner had tried to write Go Down, Moses without the substructure of family ties, Southern culture, and Biblical reference.
As I noted above, Krasznahorkai’s story turns back on itself in the end. The last couple of pages repeat verbatim the opening pages of the book. I’m not sure what effect the author intended, but for me it felt like sinking deeper into some primeval mud—that sick sensation of having one’s boots sucked off one’s feet. I didn’t exactly finish Krasznahorkai’s book: I escaped it.
Of course, the problem could be simply that I’ve lost my taste for apocalypse.
My personal favorite of his books is War And War (originally published in 1999). But I have to admit that I also like Satantango. But that's just my personal opinion. I can perfectly understand that this kind of book is not for everyone. The books he wrote after War And War have a very strong Asian influence and are in general completely different in orientation. New Direction is the first to
Thanks for your excellent response, Birne. Yes, Esti doesn't inspire antipathy as the others do; but she doesn't inspire much of anything, because she's not a realized character. None of the personas wandering through this book are fully developed—by design, I'm sure. I don't have to like or admire the design. Any reader who enjoys such slogs through the mud is welcome to them
"The story, such as it is, promises revelation but doesn't deliver it, delivering instead a fatalistic circle."<br /><br />That's pretty much one of the main points of the book. Take this very nice sentence from the 2nd chapter:<br /><br /><<"And so the words prepared for the occasion tumble over each other and begin sparring round as in a whirlpool, having formed the
this opening the opening of his novel" :<br />"His imagination was bewitched almost to the point of paralysis by the notion… "<br /><br />jeesh ! that's enough for me…. all of these demands for any conceptualization-ings is kind of a colossal bore, eh ?<br /><br /><br />
Throughout the book he strains for SIGNIFICANCE. I didn't know until just about half an hour ago that this was his first book, so some slack is probably due. Still—yes, one can almost smell the sweat glazing his forehead….
Joseph,<br /><br />I think a passage like that fails by virtue of style only. It's perhaps a Saramago who whould have penned it. Some authors just try too damn hard for their own good. As Nicklaus would say: maybe it's not the clubs but just you.