Satantango By László Krasznahorkai (Nobel Prize in Literature in 2025)

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Book of choice:
Satantango
By László Krasznahorkai
4.13 stars - 11,094 ratings - 720 reviews

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Already famous as the inspiration for the filmmaker Béla Tarr’s six-hour masterpiece, Satantango is proof that “the devil has all the good times.”
The story of Satantango, spread over a couple of days of endless rain, focuses on the dozen remaining inhabitants of an unnamed isolated hamlet: failures stuck in the middle of nowhere.
Schemes, crimes, infidelities, hopes of escape, and above all trust and its constant betrayal are Krasznahorkai’s meat. “At the center of Satantango,” George Szirtes has said, “is the eponymous drunken dance, referred to here sometimes as a tango and sometimes as a csardas. It takes place at the local inn where everyone is drunk. . . . Their world is rough and ready, lost somewhere between the comic and the tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death.”
“You know,” Mrs. Schmidt, a pivotal character, tipsily confides, “dance is my one weakness.”
About the author
László Krasznahorkai was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2025. He is a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter who is known for critically difficult and demanding novels, often labeled as postmodern, with dystopian and bleak melancholic themes. Apart from the Nobel Prize, Krasznahorkai has also been honored with numerous literary prizes, among them the highest award of the Hungarian state, the Kossuth Prize, and the 2015 Man Booker International Prize for his English-translated oeuvre.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11455485-satantango
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