ILX Book Club (Autumn Edition): Laszlo Krasznahorkai - Satantango

Starts today.

The first part this wk: 12th - 16th

The Second part nx wk: 18th - 23rd.

This is primarily known because of the six hour Bela Tarr film. Shame I don't have a copy w/me at the mo but I'm excited to read it: our first Hungarian novel :)

you are REALLY trying to make me feel guilty for reading all these lee child thrillers i got from my dad. i feel like i should watch a 6 hour bela tarr film as penance. haha! just kidding. love ya. have fun in hungary!

two weeks, have you guys learned nothing from experience

Struggled gasping over the finish halfway line.

Actually more like ambled over the line in fairly relaxed slightly non-committal fashion.

Huh, coincidentally I just watched the film yesterday, and enjoyed it so much I was thinking of getting the book. Is it worthwhile?

Depends if you fancy an exceedingly long and drawn out introduction (Part 1 is over half of the book) to some characters varying between boring and dislikeable, in prose deliberately frustrating and occasionally otherworldly, with moments of extreme harrowing bleakness.

So my first thought was that this was in the grand absurdist tradition of Kafka, Flann O'Brien, Ishiguro (ya rly) - holding up a distorting mirror to reality, grotesquely magnifying more vulgar or more despairing aspects of humanity. But as it went on it seemed less absurd and more straightforwardly bleak. Although the prose consistently wrongfoots you - it's often not clear who is speaking to whom about whom and there are definite moments of unreliable (non) narration (were Schmidt and Halic getting paid for driving cattle, sheep, or poultry?) - overall there is not much to point to in the way of outright surrealism or irrealism. Chapter 2 is the most obviously kafkaesque: the bureacracy described seems slightly but not ridiculously absurd, and it's unclear why Irimais and Petrinas are there, what their crime or mistake was, how they are to atone for it. They switch from contrition to arrogant bluster more or less at random, at one point they start acting like they're actually at a job interview which seems like a complete non sequitur. But maybe that's what bureaucracy was like in 80s Hungary, maybe that was a plausible way to behave. The following interview seems pertinent:

Could either of these novels be transported to other small towns in other cultures?

LK: No, I don’t think so. We could perhaps draw a few parallels but they would be forced: the fact is that each culture produces its own sensitive, fragile, unrepeatable conditions; smells, colors, tastes, objects and moods that seem insignificant but have a character that is all but intangible, though you are probably right, for art, and that includes the novel, has its own powers of evocation so that if I read about an inexpressible air of gloom descending on a filthy bar somewhere in Northern Portugal it conjures in me the kind of melancholy I felt the last time I drained a glass of pálinka in a bar in the south of Hungary. In this way you may arrive at some broad overarching sense of commonality between the inhabitants of Northern Portugal and the south of Hungary even though the common light switch is slightly different in the two countries, and that difference is extremely important and highly significant — but having stressed the difference we must acknowledge that the movement with which the last man in the bar switches the light off is precisely the same in both cases.
http://www.themillions.com/2012/05/anticipate-doom-the-millions-interviews-laszlo-krasznahorkai.html

Having no experience and little understanding of 1980s collectivist farm culture and the shape of its light switches I think it's difficult to get a proper grasp of this novel, how much is absurdist exaggeration and how much is true to life, whether it's intended as a dark satire of humanity in general or of the Hungarian experience in particular. Yeah yeah death of the author etc.

Would be interested in yr (or anyone's) thoughts on the film.

so far yr description of the bk sounds p similar to the film, or at least its general atmosphere. the film is def a 'universal' one - ie it's more about human fear and desire etc than it is abt the specific historical situation - and over the course of the 7 hours the major narrative spine (the return of the charismatic chancer) recedes somewhat into the background. there's also quite a lot of black humour (esp in the long segment with the drunken fat bloke).

So my first thought was that this was in the grand absurdist tradition of Kafka, Flann O'Brien

two weeks, have you guys learned nothing from experience

― j., Monday, 12 November 2012 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

why would you say a thing like that now.

I keep picking this then putting it down again, and on it goes...not a great wk for readng at the mo but I'll keep plodding on to the extent that I might arrive at a thought or two beyond being annoyed at Lazlo's habit of putting a remark from a character in brackets.

I think the bracketed remarks are all thoughts.

plodding, plodding, plodding

The film is like life: bleak, beautiful, and too long.

How long is the book?

270 pages. if it was >400 i'd be seriously questioning my commitment.

Will start reading this weekend -- no computer at home though, so probably no comments till Monday at best. I'm still not sure what I expect from this book -- I've read a few random sentences, which didn't lead me to any great idea of what sort of story it would be. Well, probably no thrilling action scenes.

I did laugh a little at the opening page where a fellow wakes up to hear a bell tool and first thinking it comes from a chapel a few kilometers away; but no, wait, that one didn't have a bell, and also it had collapsed, and in any case it would've been too far away to hear! This is possibly meant to be bleak stuff, I dunno -- I seem to recall there then being some more stuff about war & damaged buildings & a threatening sky or something & our man imagining himself crucified, so yeah, I guess so. Anyhoo, it looks like a hoot. I guess that fits with Kafka, who was good at bleak comedy.

I'm not finding so much humour in the book. It's definitely a key component in the absurdist/irrealist genre - you have to laff, else you'd cry. With Kafka it's not so much what happens as how you choose to look at it, maybe I'm just not looking at Satantango in the right way. I can imagine some of the scenes being played for laughs on the screen but as I'm reading they just seem straightforward examples of ugly or stupid human behaviour. Certainly no lols in the chapter with the mentally handicapped girl.

Don't know about this. Think I may jump ship to, um, The Long Ships.

So this was a damp squib, in the end. To refresh the cliche a little it really did feel like a firework with a 20 foot long fuse that just ends up going "phut". According to the blurb on the back, Irimias is "The Devil" whose arrival "heralds the beginning of a period of violence and greed", he swindles them out of "a fortune" and "a series of increasingly brutal events unfold". Yeah that is not what happens, although it's probably what would happen in a Hollywood bastardisation.

So, a season late, I've started this. I'm putting my hand over any posts from upthread, especially ones that use the phrase 'damp squib' and instead cross post this from the current what are you reading thread:

started santantango [sic]. opening pages excellent - mixture of mysticism, decay (of futures & pasts) and dostoevskyan rural cunning, in a symbolic almost beckettian-feeling environment (ie this is our existential position).

Still enjoying it. I like the well-conveyed sense of living in a space where there is not much to distinguish the living and the dead, and the talk about 'the machines' gives a slight sense of dislocated/atemporal science-fiction. (maybe not an accurate sense, but pleasing and adding to the sense that this is an existentially symbolic environment).

The beginning of the second chapter v Kafkaesque, and reminded me how much being a supplicant to the law is like being a supplicant to the medical profession. I'll try and go into that a bit more later when I've got the book by me, cos I find it interesting. (Is there any word more likely to deflect interest and promote boredom than 'interesting'?')

And so the words prepared for the occasion tumble over each other and begin sparring round as in a whirlpool, having formed the occasional frail, if painfully useless, sentence that, like a hastily improvised bridge, is capable of bearing only the weight of three hesitant steps before there’s the sound of a crack, when it bends, and then with one faint, final snap collapses under them so that time and time again they find themselves back in the whirlpool they entered last night when they received the sheet with its official stamp and formal summons.

This opening to the second chapter (We Are Resurrected) brought to mind parallels between this kafkaesque position in front of the law and other supplicants, those who approach the medical profession with a complicated illness. In both examples, there are carefully worked-out personal cases, a convincing narrative of detail is present in the the supplicant's mind, so convincing is it, they feel it must convince anyone who hears it that they are ill/innocent. But as with the law, they are facing a huge, amount of unintuitive detail, structural professional expertise that is nothing to do with the matter of whether they are ill or innocent. The carefully worked out narrative, usually delivered in as calm a way as possible to give weight to an impression of objective reasoning to make it more convincing, has in fact no worth. The professional doctor or lawyer knows what they need to ascertain - they have been trained in these matters, in the matter of diagnosis. Your illness or innocence are through a painstaking etiological process parcelled off into various corners of the DSM or the legal system. The organic understanding of wellness/illness/innocence/guilt, is carefully dissected and its elements picked off. You find yourself at the mercy of a greater logic, almost arbitrary seeming. (I'm not saying that it's bad - it's probably the way it should be, even if the DSM or DSM equivalent has unnerving powers of personal and social definition). All that is left is an insistence - I am innocent, I am unwell (or, more frighteningly - I am well). Everything you felt must prove your case is gradually sloughed off, leaving only an individual's insistence in a mute but benignly accusing void.

This is where the Satantango quote comes in. That whirlpool is a fair metaphor for the sensation experienced during ineffectual protestation of an individual case in a system that cannot judge on the individual case. There are moments where it feels as if you are momentarily making progress - successfully playing the system, with your evidence - but that proves to be an illusion. Belief and disbelief, proof one way or the other - it's all one to the system, which after all is just a process to be gone through (It's hardly a new obvservation - the combination of illness and law is absolutely self-evident in Kafka, and this isn't a particular point about Satantango - other than to say this bit was extremely like Kafka - I was just thinking about it on the train this morning as a consequence of reading it).

cf. my longer post upthread (spoiler free if you've finished chapter 2) but Irimais and Petrinas are not standard mute/submissive kafkaesque protagonists in this chapter, their behaviour (iirc) increasingly mirrors the system they seem to be up against - arbitray, wilful, obscure, demanding.

ah right, interesting ledge, thanks. I'm going to hit the thread properly when I'm more of a way into the book.

there's not much more to hit :)

ah.

Insomnia killed my participation in this (I think I read 2.5 chapters in two weeks)
Anyways, he's got a new essay in the New York Times: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/someones-knocking-at-my-door/ (apparently the version in the print edition will be somewhat shorter)

I'm enjoying this. After the initial kick at it hitting several pleasure spots (bleak, Beckettian, Kafakaesque, eastern european), I then started enjoying for the same reason ('Is Krasznahorkai bringing anything to this bleak, Beckettian, Kafkaesque, eastern european party?'). Plus I tired slightly of what anyone reading in translation has to put up with - a slightly cock-eyed feeling translation of the colloquial. I found it hard to swallow:

'Don't you go screaming at me, you moron,' said Mrs Schmidt quite quietly: 'I'm going out. You can do what you like.' Futaki was picking his nose. 'Look pal; he added, his voice also quiet.., or 'You two guys certainly have a sense of humour' etc. As I say you put up with it, plus it's not easy to tell what an easy translation of this sort of thing would consist of. Still it's with a certain amount of relief that you greet, 'I'm fucked if I understand any of this'.

But I've come out of that loss of sympathy now for several reasons:

1) there was a turning point during the doctor chapter where he has a vision where the doctor perceives himself a speck in 'successive waves of time', which in the context of the book felt a bit meh, and by itself it would have been. But the vision expands to one of a local natural apocalypse, with 'himself running, part of a desperate, terrified stampede comprising stags, bears, rabbits, deer, rats, insects and reptiles, dogs and men' while exhausted birds, 'the only possible hope', drop exhausted from the sky. What starts as a generic sentiment becomes something strange and specific. My sympathies swung back to the book at that point, with the doctor, drunk on pálinka, passing in and out of consciousness, trying to hang on to the world by reducing its sensory possibilities to that which can be contained by an immobile watchfulness. I liked how this chapter used the textbook descriptions of the submarine prehistory of the locale (the doctor can't tell whether it's history or prophecy - an irony: it is a description of course of his immediate context.)

2) The persistent rain. In some ways it seems like a small thing. But what otherwise might be a conventional existential limbo is given an atmosphere that is pleasingly (to me) down-at-heel, dismal in a wearying way. It's a curiously unifying aesthetic theme. (curious in that it's so simple and dull in a way). I was taking some electrics to be recycled on Sunday night - I'd been getting stuff out of storage. A terrible day for it, with persistent snow, and that slightly metallic damp iciness permeating everything. I put the bust cd, dvd, and video players on the frame of a wheelie shopping trolley (you know the sort - old ladies use them) and wheeled them up to the electric appliances recycling, over the icy and deserted streets. It reminded me of when I lived in Poland, and you'd see old women, or men, maybe not always so old, dragging electrical goods, or other cumbrous domestic items, across those large areas of urban scrub you get in Europe, particularly I guess where high rise 'stackaprole' tower blocks are common. They'd look black and hunched against the snow, like something out of a Breughel painting. It's the deteriorating fag-end of western technocracy, a true trickle-down economy. That survivalistic toiling in one persistent element (in Poland - snow from early winter to early spring) feels like Satantango.

It's an element that transfigures everything to the 'undifferentiated, runny, underground, mysteriously ordained mush' that the doctor fears. Halics, sits in his water-sodden jacket, the rain 'had not spared him or his coat, disfiguring and softening them both, Halics's whole body felt as thought it had lost definition and, as for his coat, it had lost whatever resistance to water it once had nor could it protect him from the roaring cataract of fate, or, as he tended to say, 'the rain of death in the heart'.

That Krasznahorkai makes this a sentimental peasant cliche shaves that particular meaning off the rain, so that it loses even a comforting sense of the pathetic fallacy at work - it is the prehuman, Cretaceous rain the doctor is reading about.

ok that's enough for the mo, gone on at length, but nothing much else seemed to be happening in the thread yanow.

oh, well, there's some nifty writing as well - 'as the wood creaked the wind outside, like a helpless hand searching through a dusty book for some vanished main clause, kept asking the same question time and again hoping to give a 'cheap imitation of a proper answer' to the banks of solid mud, to establish some common dynamic between tree, air and earth'. In fact copying that has made me realise what it is about the wind and the rain - it makes it feel like these people are under siege. Krasznahorkai manages to balance that well between mental/spiritual siege and physical siege - too far one way and the reader - this reader - can feel disengaged, too far the other and it could become tedious and dumb. I liked the bit where, well..

His glass tipped over and the pool of wine on the baize cloth assumed the shape of a flattened dog.

There's also a willingness to push the psychic descriptions of his characters further... Enough!

But anyway, I'm enjoying it. I'm enjoying most things at the moment. Weird.

I then started enjoying for the same reason

er wtf, 'then started not enjoying it for the same reasons' I assume. sorry, reading over it - i wrote it too hastily.

struggling a bit with the little girl and the money tree. Mrs Hasićs and millennial dreams quite good. interested to see how I&P fulfill expectation.

in honour of book club fallen hero the pinefox am reading this v slowly.

But at least reading it :-(

If teh pinefox were to liveblog reading this it might be just the push we need.

we CAN do this.

struggling a bit with the little girl and the money tree

Struggling how? It was one of the most uncomfortable things I've read in a long time but also one of the truest sections I think (in a horrible dark bleak cynical way).

I think it was because it felt like it was a section that might be termed "horribly true" that I didn't particularly like it. That childish innocence in the face of the morally criminal world thing leaves me cold - it feels like a cliche, not without truth perhaps, but a bit hackneyed (to this jaded lag anyway).

I think what I like about the rest of what I've read is that doesn't feel "horribly true" but "horribly untrue" - I like its description of the strange mental postures people assume to combat the tangible oppressive void. Several times Krasznahorkai takes a description of a character's expressive mental state and takes the description further into detailed description than feels common - this making it absurd, silly, interesting, not featureless.

yeah i suppose that chapter is pretty close to "real life tragedies" or whatever that awful genre is called. i certainly didn't enjoy reading it.

Won the Booker. I should read jump on that bandwagon and read him.

Go ahead and jump.

Won the Booker. I should read jump on that bandwagon and read him.

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 19 May 2015 21:14

Likewise, + have been in a Can Xue zone lately so can hopefully triangulate a lil' "Is _______ bringing anything to this bleak, Beckettian, Kafkaesque, _________ party?"

Well I was half-joking last night. I suppose I haven't read him because I didn't think there was enough of a twist from Kafka by setting it these in Eastern Euro backwaters so after not actually picking him up for the ILB group I left it (although Fizzles is always persuasive when talking about stuff he likes and dislikes so I probably was going to pick up someday).

I also wonder what role has the Metamorphosis at 100 anniversary played in the decision.

But look at this interview with one of his translators. It seems Lazlo shifted focus to Chinese culture. Sounds like something missed out from the conversation at the moment. Really like to check him out now.

There's a book of his Chinese travel writing coming out later this year. New Directions Press, maybe?

OK, I'm starting Satantango

Well, one thing i did not expect this book to remind me of was (a terribly bleak, mostly gag-free) Spike Milligan's 'Puckoon'.

perhaps this will be the day I start Satantango

the lyric that not even Abba could get to scan

nvm my Amazon order came today & I still need to finish the Ishiguro, look's like Satantango's gonna have to wait

Podcast:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2015/may/22/laszlo-krasznahorkai-man-booker-international-prize-2015-podcast?CMP=share_btn_tw

Anyone read the new one yet?

think we need a melancholy of resistance thread tbh

perhaps this will be the day I start Satantango

― Heroic melancholy continues to have a forceful grip on (bernard snowy), Friday, May 29, 2015 11:58 AM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

... & perhaps this will be the night I finish it

My copy arrived this week.

I'm trying to figure out if it would have been better read a segment at a time, rather than as a whole - time to ruminate a little on each part. Plus Krasznahorkai's war on the paragraph can be exhausting (though nowhere near as tough as Melancholy of Resistance.)

yeah when I first started I was sticking to a hard-and-fast "one chapter per sitting" rule, but that changed as I started getting sucked into the plot, & I'll probably read the 2 chapters I have left without any particular attention

I am sort of tempted to go for an immediate reread, while the structure of the novel is fresh in my mind, picking up loose ends / fitting details I had initially brushed past into the overall picture

speaking of structure: it occurs to me that some of the confusion of names which has plagued me throughout may be thematic -- these characters just don't care that much for each other, so whenever you fully inhabit one perspective the others necessarily become hazy -- possible exceptions for Futaki / Mrs. Schmidt / Irimias each of whom has one truly 'defining' characteristic (as opposed to being the drunkest in a group of drunk people at a certain arbitrary moment in time)

Just finished & wow I loved it

It would've been really easy to screw up the ending but I thought it was done perfectly