Search results for ""author laszlo krasznahorkai""
Profile Books Ltd Satantango
Translated by George Szirtes From the winner of the Man Booker International Prize In the darkening embers of a Communist utopia, life in a desolate Hungarian town has come to a virtual standstill. Flies buzz, spiders weave, water drips and animals root desultorily in the barnyard of a collective farm. But when the charismatic Irimias - long-thought dead - returns, the villagers fall under his spell. Irimias sets about swindling the villagers out of a fortune that might allow them to escape the emptiness and futility of their existence. He soon attains a messianic aura as he plays on the fears of the townsfolk and a series of increasingly brutal events unfold.
£10.99
Profile Books Ltd War and War
Winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize War & War begins at a point of danger: on a dark train platform Korim is on the verge of being attacked and robbed by thuggish teenagers. From here, we are carried along by the insistent voice of this nervous clerk. Desperate, at times almost mad, but also keenly empathic, Korim has discovered in a small Hungarian town's archives an antique manuscript of startling beauty: it narrates the epic tale of brothers-in-arms struggling to return home from a disastrous war. Korim is determined to do away with himself, but before he commits suicide, he feels he must escape to New York with the precious manuscript and commit it to eternity by typing it all out onto the world wide web. Following Korim with obsessive realism through the streets of New York (from his landing in a Bowery flophouse to his move far uptown with a mad interpreter), War and War relates his encounters with a fascinating range of people in a world torn between viciousness and mysterious beauty. Following the eight chapters of War & War is a short 'prequel acting as a sequel', 'Isaiah', which brings us to a dark bar, years before in Hungary, where Korim rants against the world and threatens suicide. Written like nothing else (turning single sentences into chapters), War & War affirms W. G. Sebald's comment that Krasznahorkai's prose far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing.
£10.99
Profile Books Ltd The Melancholy of Resistance
Winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize 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 rumours. 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 centre 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 Guardian, 'lifts the reader along in lunar leaps and bounds.'
£10.99