Heavenly Vision? Hallucination? An excerpt from the novel "Satantango"
Heavenly Vision? Hallucination? An excerpt from the novel "Satantango"

Summary/Abstract: Published in 1985 and made into a seven-hour film by Béla Tarr that has by now attained cultic status, Satantango is Krasznahorkai’s breakthrough work. The novel takes place in a dilapidated, weather-beaten village, unnamed but unmistakably Hungarian, whose inhabitants eek out a miserable existence. “Their world is rough and ready, lost somewhere between the comic and tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death,” writes George Szirtes, the translator of the novel. With the onset of autumn rains, life has come to a virtual standstill for the villagers when two vagrant characters arrive. Long believed dead, Petrina and the grandiloquent Irimiás are small-time swindlers who promise redemption while craving it themselves. In this excerpt they are joined by the kid, a character responsible for the suicide of his sister. As they march along in the battering rain they are surprised by a chilling apparition: the girl’s veiled corpse hovering in the fog. Satantango, translated by George Szirtes, is forthcoming in February 2012 by New Directions. This excerpt is published by arrangement with New Directions Publishing, New York, Copyright © 1985 by László Krasznahorkai and Copyright © 2012 by George Szirtes, all rights reserved.

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