The trapper and the trapped

The Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai has only lately become known to Anglophone audiences, through the masterly translations of George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet. Work written and published in the 1980s, during the corrupt and cynical last days of so-called ‘goulash communism’ under János Kádár, began to circulate in English in the early 2000s. In Sátántangó, War and War and The Melancholy of Resistance, readers were introduced to nightmarish, purgatorial worlds shot through with millennarian anxiety and a hopeless mystical yearning for the divine. Then, in 2013, the massive novel — or perhaps more accurately a cloud of novellas — Seiobo There Below (published in Hungarian in 2008) revealed a writer who had spent a decade travelling in China and Japan, and whose engagement with Buddhism had transformed a sensibility formed by Kafka, Christian eschatology and central European Absurdism. Now, after the award of the 2015 Man Booker International prize, which cemented his reputation, comes a pair of novellas, ‘The Last Wolf’ and ‘Herman’, one recent and one from the 1980s, both dealing with hunting and the relationship between humans and the animal world. For those who may not wish to plunge into the swirling currents of Krasznahorkai’s longer fiction, they provide a taste of the many pleasures of his writing, and a way to compare his early and late styles.

Krasznahorkai has stated that the full stop ‘doesn’t belong to human beings, it belongs to God’, and he is nothing if not respectful of the deity’s property rights. The more recent of the two stories, ‘The Last Wolf’, is written in a single tumbling, propulsive sentence. It is a testimony to Krasznahorkai’s craft (and that of George Szirtes) that the effect is more like following the natural rhythms of speech and thought than of being subjected to a showy diplay of writerliness.