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/
The poet George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948 and has been living in London since 1956. His translations have won The European Poetry Translation Prize and the Gold Star Award for the Republic of Hungary.
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 one-off, 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 is hypnotically 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
WAR & WAR
LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI
TRANSLATED BY GEORGE SZIRTES
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Tuskar Rock Press,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3 HolfordYard
Bevin Way
London
WC1X 9HD
First published as Háború és Háború in 1999
First published in this translation in 2006 by New Directions, NewYork
Háború és Háború copyright © 1999 by László Krasznahorkai
Translation copyright © 2006 by George Szirtes
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.
Memorial for György Korin, the hero of László Krasznahorkai’s novel War and War, on p. 253: Bronze plaque by Imre Bukta (1999) at Hallen für neue Kunst, Schaffhausen (Switzerland). 40 × 50 cm. Photo: Raussmüller Collection.
A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library
eISBN 978 1 78283 239 3
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I.Like a Burning House
II.That Intoxicating Feeling
III.All Crete
IV.The Thing in Cologne
V.To Venice
VI.Out of Which He Leads Them
VII.Taking Nothing with Him
VIII.They’ve Been to America
Isaiah Has Come
Heaven is sad