The Melancholy of Resistance - László Krasznahorkai (week 3)

This meetup is hosted by Wisdom and Woe. For more details and to sign up for this event, go to: https://www.meetup.com/wisdom-and-woe/events/315059566

The Melancholy of Resistance (László Krasznahorkai, 1998) is a metaphysical satire about a small Hungarian town on the verge of collapse: the winter is bleak and relentless, infrastructure is crumbling, and the streets are crime-ridden. As part of a "movement for moral rearmament," one Mrs. Eszter decides to invite a strange circus into town, whose centerpiece attraction is a gigantic whale carcass.

The approach of the circus prompts paranoid rumors about its sinister (even apocalyptic) purpose. The town unravels into lunacy as the increasingly agitated citizens desperately seek relief from their existential dread--whether through music, cosmology, anarchy, or authoritarianism.

The Melancholy of Resistance is a sweeping, dense work, as desolate and surreal as it is visceral and absorbing. It is notable for its unsettlingly long, monomaniacal sentences--"a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type"--that go on for pages and that is the trademark of its author. It has been adapted into both a movie and an opera. As in Moby-Dick, the whale is a symbolic vehicle for cosmic concepts in the skirmish between order and chaos, appearance and reality, meaning and nihilism.

The author, László Krasznahorkai, has written over 20 books, 6 screenplays, and is the recipient of the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Wisdom and Woe is a philosophy and literature discussion group dedicated to exploring the world, work, life, and times of Herman Melville and the 19th century Romantic movement. The group is free and open to anybody with an interest in learning and growing by "diving deeper" into "time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters."