I bought this book in Palm Springs in April 2023, after or maybe during Coachella, it was hot as fuck and the air was rasping. But inside the book, it turns out — if only I, and Palm Springs, had known — is a squelching world of endless rain, rain unvarying, and irredeemable squalid mud. Palm Springs contained its own antidote, but I, unknowing, didn't open the book then, instead I waited more than a year, until summer in Vancouver, to let the effluvium of Satantango flow over me.
Krasznahorkai's paragraphless chapters rush headlong like a damned soul descending into hell. But it's a story of two resurrections, one fake and one real, or maybe four, because Beckett and Kafka are also resurrected here and seem quite content to play along. The text loops, the characters loop, the clocks loop and glitch, everyone swirls down the drain in the unvarying Hungarian rain. It bothered me to have to put this book down. There are unexplained vagabond horses in the town square, a madman in a chapel — these things just happen to happen. Bureaucracy, spiders. Krasz's playful use of inverted commas to insert poetry slash cliché into his mudfest. Your savior definitely won't save yer. And chapter-beginning sentences like this:
Quietly, continually, the rain fell and the inconsolable wind that died then was forever resurrected ruffled the still surfaces of puddles so lightly it failed to disturb the delicate dead skin that had covered them during the night so that instead of recovering the previous day's tired glitter they increasingly and remorselessly absorbed the light that swam slowly out of the east.
Every chapter (tr. Szirtes, whose poetry I like) was like an excellent drug to me.