László Krasznahorkai and Contemporary Europe’s Perilous Reality

In 2011, I wrote that reading László Krasznahorkai “is a little like seeing a group of people standing in a circle in a town square, apparently warming their hands at a fire, only to discover, as one gets closer, that there is no fire, and that they are gathered around nothing at all.” For many ordinary readers, the idea of entering a fictional world constantly teetering on the edge of a revelation that is always imminent but concealed, in which words pace ceaselessly around reference, and whose favored tool is the long, unstopped sentence, one that takes, say, four hundred pages to unfurl, might constitute—well, it might constitute precisely the kind of teetering insanity that Krasznahorkai has written so brilliantly and sympathetically about, for so many years. It might constitute wh