Lszl Krasznahorkai, The Art of Fiction No. 240 - unlocked Paris Review interview

László Krasznahorkai was born in 1954 in Gyula, a provincial town in Hungary, in the Soviet era. He published his first novel, Satantango, in 1985, then The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), War and War (1999), and Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (2016). These novels, with their giant accretions of language, global ­erudition (he’s as familiar with the classics of Buddhist philosophy as he is with the European intellectual tradition), obsessive characters, and rain-sodden landscapes, might give an impression of hardened late-modernist hauteur, but they are also pointillist, elegant, and delicately funny. His gravity has panache—a collision of tones visible in other works he has produced alongside the novels, which ­include short fictions such as Animalinside (2010) and geographically vaster texts like Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens (2004) and Seiobo There Below (2008).
Although Krasznahorkai still has a house in Hungary, he mainly lives in Berlin. The first time I tried to reach Berlin from London to begin this interview, in the winter of 2016, my plane was canceled due to fog. A few hours later, as my new flight was on the tarmac, we were told that technical difficulties would further delay our departure. Having at last arrived in Berlin and found a taxi—driving at unnervingly high speed because, the driver told me, he desperately needed to find a bathroom—I found Krasznahorkai in front of the U-Bahn entrance at Hermannplatz, twelve hours after I had left London. I might as well have met him in Beijing. This elongated contemporary travel farce, I thought, seemed incongruously comical. But then I reconsidered: Krasznahorkai’s art has always been hospitable to the absurd, to the ways the world will personify itself and become an implacable opponent.
Krasznahorkai speaks English with a seductive Mitteleuropean ­inflection and the occasional American accent, the result of his time in the nineties living in Allen Ginsberg’s New York apartment. Krasznahorkai is a large, gentle man, often laughing or smiling and full of creaturely care. He loaned me a sweater when I looked cold, bought me Durs Grünbein’s poetry collection Una Storia Vera as a present, and offered recommendations of György Kurtág recordings. With his long hair and mournful eyes, he looks like a ­benign saint. He is also a man of absolute privacy; he never, therefore, wanted to meet in his apartment. Instead, we conducted long sessions in its general environs, in various cafés and restaurants around Kreuzberg.
—Adam Thirlwell
interview follows …

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/7177/the-art-of-fiction-no-240-laszlo-krasznahorkai



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