Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose. A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumors. Schmidt, a pivotal character, tipsily confides, “dance is my one weakness. The Melancholy of Resistance, Lszl Krasznahorkai’s magisterial, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. Theirs is the dance of death.” “You know,” Mrs. Their world is rough and ready, lost somewhere between the comic and tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. It takes place at the local inn where everyone is drunk. “At the center of Satantango,” George Szirtes has said, “is the eponymous drunken dance, referred to here sometimes as a tango and sometimes as a csardas. Schemes, crimes, infidelities, hopes of escape, and above all trust and its constant betrayal are Krasznahorkai’s meat. Translated from Hungarian by George SzirtesĪlready famous as the inspiration for the filmmaker Béla Tarr’s six-hour masterpiece, Satantango is proof, as the spellbinding, bleak, and hauntingly beautiful book has it, that “the devil has all the good times.” The story of Satantango, spread over a couple of days of endless rain, focuses on the dozen remaining inhabitants of an unnamed isolated hamlet: failures stuck in the middle of nowhere. Winner of the 2013 Best Translated Book Award Satantango by László Krasznahorkai
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