Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance are irresistible, unforgettable and required reading.

Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times

The Hungarian master’s first work to appear in English, and still one of the best

The Melancholy of Resistance

Fiction by László Krasznahorkai

Translated from Hungarian by George Szirtes

The Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai’s magisterial, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumors. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, 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.”

Buy The Melancholy of Resistance

Paperback(published Jun, 01 2002)

ISBN
9780811215046
Price US
16.95
Trim Size
5x8
Page Count
320

Ebook(published Jun, 01 2002)

ISBN
9780811220101
Price US
16.95

Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance are irresistible, unforgettable and required reading.

Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times

An inexorable, visionary book by the contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse who inspires comparison with Gogol and Melville.

Susan Sontag

This is a book about a world into which the Leviathan 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