LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI

László Krasznahorkai was born in 1954 in Gyula, a provincial town in Hungary, in the Soviet era. He published his first novel, Satantango, in 1985, then The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), War and War (1999), and Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (2016). These novels, with their giant accretions of language, global erudition (he’s as familiar with the classics of Buddhist philosophy as he is with the European intellectual tradition), obsessive characters, and rain-sodden landscapes, might give an impression of hardened late-modernist hauteur, but they are also pointillist, elegant, and delicately funny. His gravity has panache—a collision of tones visible in other works he has produced alongside the novels, which include short fictions such as Animalinside (2010) and geographically vaster texts like Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens (2004) and Seiobo There Below (2008).

Although Krasznahorkai still has a house in Hungary, he mainly lives in Berlin. The first time I tried to reach Berlin from London to begin this interview, in the winter of 2016, my plane was canceled due to fog. A few hours later, as my new flight was on the tarmac, we were told that technical difficulties would further delay our departure. Having at last arrived in Berlin and found a taxi—driving at unnervingly high speed because, the driver told me, he desperately needed to find a bathroom—I found Krasznahorkai in front of the U-Bahn entrance at Hermannplatz, twelve hours after I had left London. I might as well have met him in Beijing. This elongated contemporary travel farce, I thought, seemed incongruously comical. But then I reconsidered: Krasznahorkai’s art has always been hospitable to the absurd, to the ways the world will personify itself and become an implacable opponent.

Krasznahorkai speaks English with a seductive Mitteleuropean inflection and the occasional American accent, the result of his time in the nineties living in Allen Ginsberg’s New York apartment. Krasznahorkai is a large, gentle man, often laughing or smiling and full of creaturely care. He offered me a sweater when I looked cold, bought me Durs Grünbein’s poetry collection Una Storia Vera as a present, and offered recommendations of György Kurtág recordings. With his long hair and mournful eyes, he looks like a benign saint. He is also a man of absolute privacy; he never, therefore, wanted to meet in his apartment. Instead, we conducted long sessions in its general environs, in various cafés and restaurants around Kreuzberg.

INTERVIEWER

Let’s talk about your beginning as a writer.

KRASZNAHORKAI

I thought that real life, true life was elsewhere. Along with The Castle by Franz Kafka, my bible for a while was Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. This was the late sixties, early seventies. I didn’t want to accept the role of a writer. I wanted to write just one book—and after that, I wanted to do different things, especially with music. I wanted to live with the poorest people—I thought that was real life. I lived in very poor villages. I always had very bad jobs. I changed location very often, every three or four months, in an escape from mandatory military service.

And then, as soon as I started to publish some small things, I received an invitation from the police. I was maybe a little bit too impertinent, because after every question I said, “Please believe me, I don’t deal with politics.” “But we know some things about you.” “No, I don’t write about contemporary politics.” “We don’t believe you.” After a while, I became a little angry and said, “Could you really imagine that I’d write anything about people like you?” And that enraged them, of course, and one of the police officers, or someone from the secret police, wanted to confiscate my passport. In the Communist system in the Soviet era, we had two different passports, blue and red, and I only had the red one. The red wasn’t so interesting because with it you could only go to socialist countries, whereas the blue one meant freedom. So I said, You really want the red one? But they still took it away, and I didn’t have any passport until 1987.

That was the first story of my writing career—and could easily have been the last. Recently, in the documents of the secret police, I found notes where they discuss potential informers and spies. They had some chance with my brother, they wrote, but with Krasznahorkai, it would be absolutely impossible because he was so anticommunist. This