talia's Reviews > Satantango

The Hungarian “estate” in which most of Satantango takes place is a desperate, squalid, and miserable place. Its inhabitants have given up, more or less. Their despair is ubiquitous: It practically shimmers off the walls of the buildings. On the morning in which the novel begins, the narrator tells us that it 'was hard to know whether the gently vibrating patches on the wall were merely shadows or the symptoms of the despair underlying their faintly hopeful thoughts.' The sense of their despair is so palpable that it almost spills into the supernatural.

This is a novel about hope and hopelessness. It is a novel about cruelty and neglect. Perhaps it is a novel about communist Hungary, but my sense is that Krasznahorkai's vision here is much bigger than that. The novel is, ostensibly, about a bunch of decrepit, deceitful, and bickering drunks putting their hopes on a man who had paid a local boy, previously, to tell them he was dead. This man, at one point, is called 'an angel of hope to hopeless people with hopeless difficulties.' He appears at various times to be a prophet, a criminal, a rebel, a bully, and a saint. Always, he is a mystery.

This is a slippery, elusive, dreamlike novel, often reaching towards the mystical. Essential information is withheld. Time leaps between chapters, leaving key events shrouded in mystery. We often enter into the minds of its characters but are rarely given to understand them. Miracles occur, but without explanation or consequence. (Or are they hallucinations? Whatever the case, the story moves on.) Spiders weave webs with preternatural pace. And the ending, which is one of the novel's greatest graces, and which I won't spoil, certainly deepens the sense of mystery and mysticism that makes this novel so powerful.

It is a novel notable for the variety of techniques that Krasznahorkai deploys for its atmosphere. Each chapter is a full paragraph in length, and there is a tremendous amount of stylistic variety among the chapters. In one chapter, for example, as we drift from narration into dream sequence, punctuation disappears and the words on the page literally start to merge. The first six chapters are counted in ascending order, the next six in descending order. While some chapters follow a character in a close third person, others jump into omniscience, or else move swiftly across the minds of a group.

And while the third person prose often brings us close to a character's consciousness, Krasznahorkai also deploys quotation marks to capture the characters' thoughts - collective, individual, and typical: we can’t always be sure. Sometimes the quotation marks don’t seem to capture anyone’s thoughts in particular, and seem rather to be used for comic effect, such as when the phrase 'billiards table' never appears without them.

Then there is the squalor, the endless squalor:

'The smell of mould rising from the floor at the corners of the room surrounded the vanguard of cockroaches working their way down the back walls...’

'Autumnal horse-flies were buzzing round the cracked lampshade, describing drowsy figures of eight in its weak light, time and again colliding with filthy porcelain....'

'The stench of sewers mixed with mud, puddles, the smell of the odd crack of lightning, wind tugging at tiles, power lines, empty nests...'

Yet in spite of all this, the novel is full of so much life and energy. It is often very funny. The aura of mystery is thick and wonderful and totally unique. The closest touchpoint is Kafka, whose words provide its epigraph ('In that case, I’ll miss the thing by waiting for it'). Another, more recent touchpoint, is Fernanda Melchor's Hurricane Season, which is perhaps even more squalid, darker, and which shares a lot of similarities to Satantango in structure, perspective, and setting. Of course, there are similarities too with Thomas Bernhard - in the darkness of the vision, the long paragraphs, the way the prose tends to loop and lap like criss-crossing waves over a small variety of themes. And also to other heirs of the Kafka-Beckett-Bernhard lineage, such as Mathias Enard and W. G. Sebald, who himself said that the 'universality of Krasznahorkai’s vision... far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing.'

I have kept this review as abstract as possible, because I don’t want to give too much away. I would not recommend this for someone who is not in the mood for squalor. But when you think you can handle it, it will be a small price to pay for a great piece of literature.