László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954. He has written five novels and won numerous prizes, including the International Man Booker Prize 2015, the 2013 Best Translated Book Award in Fiction for Satantango, and the 1993 Best Book of the Year Award in Germany for The Melancholy of Resistance. For more about Krasznahorkai, visit his extensive website: http://www.krasznahorkai.hu/
PRAISE FOR LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI
“Throughout Krasznahorkai’s work, what strikes the reader above all are the extraordinary sentences, sentences of incredible length that go to incredible lengths, their tone switching from solemn to madcap to quizzical to desolate as they go their wayward way; epic sentences that, like a lint roll, pick up all sorts of odd and unexpected things as they accumulate inexorably into paragraphs that are as monumental as they are scabrous and musical” Man International Booker Prize judges’ citation
“The latest and most luminous book to appear in English by the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai … a devastatingly thoughtful, austere and contemplative book, written with a deep knowledge of artistic technique and human affairs that is rare among novelists” Tim Martin, Daily Telegraph
“Krasznahorkai is a visionary writer” Theo Tait, Guardian
“Krasznahorkai is the kind of writer who at least once on every page finds a way of expressing something one has always sensed but never known, let alone been able to describe” Nicole Krauss
“As always with Mr Krasznahorkai, real understanding remains beyond grasp, though a sense of illumination is pervasive. As a novelist he is a oneoff, even if his work—as this book so finely shows—is universal” Economist
“The contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse who inspires comparison with Gogol and Melville” Susan Sontag
“Krasznahorkai’s subject is a total disenchantment with the world, and yet the manner in which he presents this disenchantment ishypnotically enchanting. He is one of the great inventors of new forms in contemporary literature” New York Review of Books
“László Krasznahorkhai offers us stories that are relentlessly generative and defiantly irresolvable. They are haunting, pleasantly weird and, ultimately, bigger than the worlds they inhabit” International Herald Tribune
“Krasznahorkai is clearly fascinated by apocalypse, by broken revelation, indecipherable messages. To be always ‘on the threshold of some decisive perception’ is as natural to a Krasznahorkai character as thinking about God is to a Dostoyevsky character; the Krasznahorkai world is a Dostoyevskian one from which God has been removed” New Yorker
“The rolling continuity of Krasznahorkai’s prose slides between viewpoints, tracks back and forth in repetition and re-emphasis, steps aside to remember a different time, resembling the flux of memory, which at any moment may be jolted into the present. After many pages of being suspended in the unending, the approach to a full stop can bring a sense of dread, which Krasznahorkai most often justifies in his final phrase or two: the prose lifts us up: then we drop” Times Literary Supplement
THE LAST WOLF
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Tuskar Rock Press,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3 Holford Yard
Bevin Way
London
WC1X 9HD
First published in this translation in 2016 by
New Directions Books, New York
Design by Erik Rieselbach
The Last Wolf was first published as Az utolsó farkas in 2009
Copyright © 2009 by László Krasznahorkai
Translation copyright © 2009 by George Szirtes
Herman was first published as Kegyelmi viszonyok in 1986
Copyright © 1986 by László Krasznahorkai
Translation copyright © 2016 by John Batki
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library
eISBN 978 1 78283 342 0
Table of Contents
THE LAST WOLF
HERMAN
THE LAST WOLF
Translated by George Szirtes
There he was, laughing, but in trying to laugh in a more abandoned manner he had become preoccupied with the question of whether there was any difference at all between the burden of futility on the one hand and the burden of scorn on the other as well as with what he was laughing about anyway, because the subject was, uniquely, everything, arising from an everything that was everywhere, and, what was more, if indeed it was everything, arising out of everywhere, it would be difficult enough to decide what it was at, arising out of what, and in any case it wouldn’t be full-hearted laughter, because futility and scorn were what continually oppressed him, and he was doing nothing, not a damn thing, simply drifting, spending hours sitting in the Sparschwein with his first glass of Sternburg at his side, while everything around him positively dripped with futility, nor to mention scorn, though there was an occasional drop in the intensity of this feeling, moments in which he actually forgot about it and stared quite blankly ahead, staring for interminable minutes at a time at a crack or a stain on the wooden floor of the bar, since this was the simplest thing to do, that is after having dropped round the corner, immediately after waking, to start there and end there, not as though he were drinking himself stupid, for after all he couldn’t even afford to do that, but rather, as always, out of sheer habit, because at some time he must have said, bring me a Sternburg bitte, and ever since then that is what he had been served with, as soon as the man caught sight of him, so he didn’t even have to open his mouth but simply step into the Sparschwein and there was the Sternburg ready on his table, not that he took deep draughts of it of course, taking just the odd sip, just enough so he should be able to remain there, as indeed he did remain, generally for two or three hours, and even then he only left the table so as to take a turn round the Hauptstrasse with its filthy sidewalks, down toward Goeben, then out toward the Kleistpark as far as Kaiser-Wilhelm-Platz, where he would cross to the far side by the fishmongers and Humana Second Hand in order to retrace his steps, the sidewalk horribly filthy because everyone, young and old, was constantly spitting on it as they walked or just stood, but spitting in any case, even when looking into a shop window or waiting for a bus, and that might have been why it all felt so sticky wherever he went, not like a place for walking, because as soon as you set off you feared you’d soon be stuck fast, so you needed to walk at a certain speed, at brisk walking paceTHERE IS NOTHING THEREcouldGastarbeiterswasfincafincadehesaencina,dehesadehesadehesaautopistasextreoutsideout of,autopistasdufincafincafincaloberíafincasa warden,himhimStammgastperishedwolvesthe last wolvesfincadehesa,loberofincaloberoStammgastel amor de los animales es el unico amor que el hombre puede cultiva sin cosechar el desengañoloberoloberoloberofincaloberofincafinca,loberofincanotshe could not runjust like thatfinca