Every human culture is created by fear, and from this grows the order of conceptions
Once again, we find ourselves in Gyula, or, rather, Krasznahorkai's fictionalized version of Gyula, to welcome home Baron Béla Wenckheim, decades heretofore removed to far-flung Argentina where he, unbeknownst to us, has gambled away his fortune at the porteño casinos, now returning to our Gyula in the winter of his life to rekindle the near-extinguished flame once shared with our dear Marietta, to rejuvenate our stagnating and frigid little town with his supposed fortune; A series of humiliating misfortunes surrounding the Baron's homecoming lead to a scathing media hit piece on Hungary as a nation, scandalizing the town and portending its end.
Krasznahorkai declares this book to be a synthesis of his previous works, a single work representative of War & War, Sátántangó, and The Melancholy of Resistance. Though the themes of all these are present, I found Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming to be the weakest of them. The scope felt too grand and the moments of minute devastation were glazed over. The climax of the novel, the meeting between the Baron and his former love, feels rushed, the reader is alienated from the important moments by the rapid and constant shifts in attention. There are two moments of high strangeness (the procession scenes) that try so hard to be evocative but miss the mark because they are just too abstract in the already muddled chaos. Overall, this is great because that is all Krasznahorkai can be, but far inferior to his previous entries.
Though annoying to read through, the professor's philosophical musings may have been the best parts Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming. There is one passage where he cogitates the role of fear in spirituality and what we lose in society without God. When God is rejected, we reject the foundation that culture is built on; rejection of God without the rejection of Bach and Dante is cowardly, according to Krasznahorkai. Belief is a load bearing wall that upholds personhood, repositioning ourselves as secular humanists is dishonest, human dignity loses significance when we no longer believe ourselves to be created in the image of God.