I could watch this scene from Werckmeister Harmonies every day for the rest of my life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d5X2t_s9g8
And The Turin Horse as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wPCkjN3n6s
Think of some magical Tarr adaptation of Seiobo There Below...
I would describe his writing style as relentlessly oppressive, and hypnotic.
When Turin Horse came out I saw it at the NYFF (with an hour long talk in a small room with the director) and then another 3 times in theaters afterward. I've been lucky to catch Satantango and Werckmeister on film.
Tarr also mentored a young Chinese director, Hu Bo. His two works are very good: An Elephant Sitting Still and Man in the Well. Tarr came out to TIFF to introduce and eulogize the latter with an impassioned speech.
edit: Forgot that Criterion finally released a new edition of Werckmeister recently.
Satantango was screened with a full dinner break in the middle (long enough to see another movie in the interim) when I saw it, but this one I went to had to be spread out over two days
Turin Horse is an original work by Krasznahorkai without being an adaptation, too. (I've seen that one 7 or 8 times, 4 during its festival & cinema run.)
To dismiss them would be like to dismiss his works with Max Neumann (AnimalInside being one of his best!) because they combine writing with painting instead of being pure literature.
> I honestly say the films from Tarr are arguably the best book-to-film adaptations ever, especially Sátántangó, he is the master of literary filmmaking where the spirit of text comes across the screen perfectly.
I know the films, I've watched them all, but doing e.g. Satantango in book form sounds not so enticing?
>Running time: ~8 hours
Yeah, I'll pass.
Every time I read a translation of highly regarded literature I can't help but wonder if I'm getting some inadequate rendition that is missing something critical to why the originals are so highly regarded. This isn't meant to be a criticism of translators, just that I think their job is very difficult.
Of course, I still happily read and enjoy translations; there's just this shadow cast for me all the time by the originals.
Or something like this, just trying to express that I've never really thought about it like that. That we don't really interact with original works when we read/listen to translated works and thus we can't really say anything about the originals.
Small mind blown moment!
https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/season-swamp
On the topic of the OP, I struggled with Satantango on more than one occasion over the last 12 years. For whatever reason I couldn't get through it, but I've carried the book around through several moves. Maybe I'll try again.
One of the biggest things is that there are lots of old public domain translations of popular works, but the translations are very outdated. They rank higher in Amazon because either they are cheaper, or their publishers use their power to rank them higher because they are making a bigger profit. The new translations of Les Misérables are superior, but the one that is pushed highest is the 100 year old translation that is the "official" version that the (excellent) popular musical have put their stamp of approval (and poster) onto.
As pieces on their own they are great, but how close are they to the original? Like some translations are garbage others are amazing so how much of the original spirit is intact.
"All of my remaining realisable assets are to be disbursed as follows: the capital, converted to safe securities by my executors, is to constitute a fund, the interest on which is to be distributed annually as prizes to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind … one part to the person who, in the field of literature, produced the most outstanding work in an ideal direction;"
Has anyone any insight on this?
https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred-nobel/full-text-of-alfred-...
I think that's fine. Often it's not really possible to assess the impact of a contribution until long after, it takes a lot of context to be able to do that.
In comparison the US system seems hopelessly outdated, and even riven with the many of the same problems we had during the George III mad king era, except we managed to move on.
When Napoleon seized power in 1799, he crafted a French constitution that he wanted to be “short and obscure”, the better to enable his authoritarian power. The United States has ended in the same place.
What is “obscure” in the US constitution?
The first amendment is the one thing that makes it impossible for authoritarian US to be reality.
Second, its meaning IS obscure. It get reinterpreted and modified by supreme court to unrecognizable degree. The words dont mean what they used to mean back then, because court used some alternative history to achieve their political goal. It is also not like the court was grounded in contemporary reality when making those decisions and explaining them.
Most of constitutional protections are weak. There is no recourse if your rights are broken, only ever increasing maze of special conditions and requirements you need to fill if you want those protections to apply.
Well, this is not true. As a matter of fact, you can talk about it without fear that you would be arrested for your speech. In real authoritarian regimes, e.g., Jordan, Qatar, China, Russia (de jure protections exist, de facto not so much) you have no protections at all. In those places speaking out means you end up in jail.
> We are watching US constitution collapse right now.
Can you give an example?
> Second, its meaning IS obscure. It get reinterpreted and modified by supreme court to unrecognizable degree.
What article do you think was interpreted to unrecognizable degree?
> The words dont mean what they used to mean back then, because court used some alternative history to achieve their political goal.
Can you provide an example for that as well?
> It is also not like the court was grounded in contemporary reality when making those decisions and explaining them.
I think this is the case with all the precedent-based judicial systems, no?
> Most of constitutional protections are weak. There is no recourse if your rights are broken, only ever increasing maze of special conditions and requirements you need to fill if you want those protections to apply.
In order to argue about that you would have to be specific. It seems to me that the constitutional protections are the only ones that actually work, e.g., 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 5th amendments are really powerful, and go without saying.
I mean, ol' minihands is certainly _trying_ to erode the first amendment. Now the question is whether the courts will let him.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/us/politics/trump-freedom...
And since the literature committee tends to be run by extremely pretentious artists they don't like idealism anyway. Artists are supposed to be tortured postmodern souls you know.
A lot of people want Haruki Murakami to get the prize, but I don't think his work would pass this.
2025 - László Krasznahorkai - Literature - for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.
2023 - Katalin Karikó - Physiology or Medicine - for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.
2023 - Ferenc Krausz - Physics - for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter.
To be fair, there are only 2 others since 2000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hungarian_Nobel_laurea...
I am glad that these people could achive so much coming from a place like Hungary, that is providing inadequate possibilities for these kinds of achivements so they reach it in other countries too many times. Or sometimes even put obstacles in their ways - which is actually good/ok in the end as they seek out the places allowing their success.
But I am glad for any Nobel price winners, regardless of their origins. They give us so much.
Katalin Karikó went to the same University as my sister (Szeged).
But yes, we have to leave the country if we want good opportunities.. unless we go into politics! Fidesz is easily the most successful startup in Hungary after 1989, possibly in Europe; Fidesz' CEO is one of the richest men in Europe.. unfortunately at our expense.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...
I recommend not only his early works like Satantango but also his recent ones like Seiobo There Below (lucky to have a signed copy of this one).
The short ones are interesting too. Animalinside (with Max Neumann), The Last Wolf.
Interested in checking Chasing Homer which has musical accompaniment: "Publishers Weekly described the book as a cross between a Jean-Claude Van Damme film and the works of Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka"
You might also try A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East as a very short one of his later works
Wow I just found out that I have quite a valuable collection of his works - the surprisingly expensive ones that I had casually picked up when they were new:
- The Last Wolf 1st edition, $300
- Satantango 1st edition, $200
- Music & Literature No. 2, unknown value (no record of secondary market resale)
- AnimalInside, $300, only 2000 copies published
Time to encase these in something...
They're intricate, reference-heavy, postmodern novels with a lot of the emotional intensity purposely occulted behind the prose style. If you like Gass or Sebald you'll have fun.
You can also appreciate him through his screenplay work on Bela Tarr's movies.
Do you have a GoodReads that you'd share?
Yes, there is a fair amount of under-the-grass (sometimes over) anti-semitism in Hungary (and many other European countries), as well as racism towards people with darker skin, but certainly not every hungarian intellectual over 40.
I liked both of Annie Ernaux's books about her parents.
1)The writing is very bad (which is ironic because she got mad at Houellebecq for being a racist and said that he is translated a lot because he writes like shit so easy to translate). You take an average page of Ernaux (in French) and it's just not very... sophisticated at all, but then all the critics that like her say that this language "unmasks" the reality and is the perfect medium for "autofiction".
2)Her initial ascension has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of her writing(which is very bad), but rather with her "social" message. Her entire work is basically about how she is from a working class family background which is very horrible and sexist, and going to school and university is how she escaped this horrible environment(domineering dad, "rape" that's not really rape, abortions, etc.) . She is basically "anti-beauf" and that's all.
To summarize, I would say that she is like the left-wing analogue of Houellebecq, except that Houellebecq (rightfully) doesn't win the Nobel Prize for shitty writing. I'm certainly elitist a bit of a "reactionary", but for Ernaux its so flagrant that what got rewarded was the political message and not the quality of the writing.
don't worry, a reactionary will get their time soon enough again. last night, actually, my thought was: i bet it's gonna be a conservative (given the current political climate and how ironically "conservatism" is trendy as "avant-garde" despite the oxymoron in how conservative ideas are some of the most basic and mainstream ideas in the world)
As for reactionaries/conservatives winning, it's basically impossible for someone to win this award as a genuine "reactionary". The last genuine reactionary who won it was Solzhenitsyn, and it would never be awarded to him if they were aware of all of his views.
perhaps the same kind of hyperbole krasznahorkai likes to use when talking about the "arabs": "I'm sure the Arabs would accept me now that they're gonna cut off my nose, then my eyes, and then they'll poke my eyes out, my tongue rip it out, everything that sticks out of me, cut it off, tortured me, and then shoot me. So that is the Jewish past is enough for me. That’s all the family history" (https://www.szombat.org/kultura-muveszetek/krasznahorkai-las...) (...that's an example among many)
Considering there was literally just an attack on a UK synagogue by an arab, after which many people protested on the side of the attacker in London, you don't think there's a tiny legitimacy to his views?
Of course this is a rhetorical question, because your obviously don't think his views has legitimacy.
Just like it’s not ok to see all jews as part of the same murderous conspiracy, it’s not ok to see all arabs as part of one either.
In particular, it seems to be inversely proportional to fertility rate. The lower the fertility rate, the more racist countries seem to be (e.g: Italy, Korea, Hungary, Japan, etc).
Plenty of racism in India, Pakistan, China, MENA (where slavery is common, Libya has open air black slave markets), and Africa itself. And let's not even get started how plenty of these places are ravaged by petty sectarian, ethnical violence, or straight out civil wars between communities.
You just don't hear about all that because most of these places don't have a free press, or people are too busy trying to survive another day to testify.
There are at least 4/5 genocides happening right now in Africa & MENA, and I don't include whatever is going on in Gaza, can you name them?
In 1974, The Swedish Academy was heavily criticized for awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature to two of its own members. One laureate, Harry Martinson, was so shaken by the backlash he committed suicide 4 years later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Martinson#Later_life_and...
But what's the point, he was gone .-.