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László Krasznahorkai: Architect of the Apocalypse

[A translated/edited/abbreviatied version of this text appears in taz]

This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature goes to László Krasznahorkai, a writer whose work carries forward the torch lit by earlier laureate Imre Kertész yet bends narrative and history into shapes entirely his own. His early novels, those deeply dark visions that first brought him recognition, emerged through an extraordinary collaboration with filmmaker Béla Tarr, whose camera seemed to capture the very texture of Krasznahorkai’s apocalyptic prose. The Swedish Academy’s citation rings true: here is a writer whose captivating and visionary body of work affirms art’s stubborn power even as it stares into apocalyptic horror.

The foundation of Krasznahorkai’s reputation rests on those profoundly dark early novels: “Satanstango,” “The Melancholy of Resistance,” “War and War.” These are books where body, space, and narrative become inseparable elements, where nature itself turns menacing, inescapable. His characters don’t simply experience poverty or social decay; they inhabit their desolation as if it were destiny itself, its machinery grinding away beyond any human reach or comprehension.

What’s remarkable is how these novels, written before and after Eastern Europe’s seismic shifts in 1989, present characters and situations that resist every conventional reading of historical change. Yes, he was already chronicling decay and poverty in the 1980s, but when the new order arrived, Krasznahorkai turned his critical eye toward the wholesale, unquestioning embrace of neocapitalism with equal ferocity.

Then comes the turn: those lighter, more expansive later books where Krasznahorkai’s lens widens through travel, through an almost obsessive engagement with art itself as subject and salvation.

Take “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming” (2016), a novel that functions as a kind of bridge. Here he returns to the Hungarian provinces, yes, and the melancholic register of his early work resurfaces, but now there’s a narrative maturity that transforms everything it touches. The philosophical weight shifts toward the dignity inherent in failure, toward music’s strange redemptive possibilities.

This Nobel Prize, then, recognizes not merely the foundational early work that carved out Krasznahorkai’s place in the canon, but equally his evolution as an artist. You can see it crystallized in books like “In the North a Mountain, in the South a Lake, in the West Roads, in the East a River,” where Prince Genji’s grandson from Murasaki Shikibu’s classical novel wanders in search of a mythical garden. Here, the quest for transcendence and art’s claim to be the highest reality move from subtext to center stage.

“Satanstango” (1985) unfolds its nightmarish tales in spaces that feel cursed, dwellings haunted by monsters, zombies, or those holy fools who stumble through Krasznahorkai’s universe. The atmosphere doesn’t just feel desolate; it vibrates with Kafkaesque uncertainty, with the uncanny electricity of magical realism.

Then there’s “The Melancholy of Resistance” (1989), where a traveling circus arrives bearing the stuffed carcass of the world’s largest whale, and with it, chaos. At the eye of this storm stands János Valuska, another of those simple-minded saints Krasznahorkai loves. His counterweight, the music teacher Mr. Eszter, confronts Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier only to discover that everything he believed about music’s harmony with the cosmos might be illusion.

“War and War” (1999), the product of years of meticulous preparation, follows the eccentric archivist György Korin as his belief in an eternal, unified world crumbles. His response is a prophetic mission that liberates him: he flies to New York to upload a discovered manuscript to the internet, convinced that virtual space offers an immortal, purely intellectual matrix where the document can exist forever.

The story collection “The World Goes On” (2013) brings this trajectory to its melancholic conclusion. The world continues, yes, but in a direction that human metrics cannot measure, expressing the fundamental impossibility of maintaining any unity with existence itself.

The more recent “Herscht 07769” (2021) transplants Krasznahorkai’s universal dread of failure to provincial Thuringia. The protagonist, Florian Herscht, a naive bodybuilder entangled with neo-Nazis, becomes a contemporary incarnation of that holy fool János Valuska. Convinced that the asymmetry between matter and antimatter signals the world’s immediate end, Herscht fires off desperate warning letters to Chancellor Angela Merkel that go forever unanswered.

Here’s Krasznahorkai’s anarchist stance laid bare: the apocalypse isn’t coming; it’s already here, breathing down our necks. The protagonist’s futile attempts to alert those in power reveal how completely authority remains deaf to the existential anguish of ordinary people.

The timing of the Nobel Prize honor is also politically relevant. László Krasznahorkai is considered a prominent critic of Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian government in Hungary. In “Herscht 07769,” he depicts the infiltration of neo-Nazis into a small Thuringian town. The book is essentially a great contemporary German novel that captures the country’s social unrest.

However, the relatively straightforward political satire of “Herscht 07769” represents something of a dilution of Krasznahorkai’s otherwise labyrinthine complexity. His true gift lies elsewhere: in those metafictional, timeless wrestlings with history and myth, often inserting versions of himself (characters literally named Krasznahorkai) into the narrative fabric. This direct staging of specific political grievances steps away from the great lyrical beauty and subtle, epic depth that earned him the Nobel Prize.

I keep coming back to this: Krasznahorkai writes like an anarchist. Not in the bomb-throwing sense, but in the way that art, for him, exists entirely outside the structures that pretend to contain it. It’s the permanent territory of the outsider, and he knows (really knows) that our concepts, our words, all these tools we use to navigate what we call reality are useless. Every novel he’s written throws characters into impossible situations where they’re clutching at shadows, at illusions, and this doomed reaching, this is what drives everything. Look: here’s a world built by power, where those on top construct these threatening narratives and everyone else has to live inside them. Crushed by stories they never chose. And somewhere in his work he offers this paradox that memory works through forgetting. Think about that. It’s perfect, really, because that’s exactly how he approaches history: not through the obvious events and dates, but by digging into the emotional undertow, those hidden connections that actually move things while we’re looking elsewhere.

And this is where Krasznahorkai becomes something else entirely: the postmodern historian who makes history physical, who hauls it into the town square where his characters can actually touch it, shake it, demand answers about right now. Every book stages this war over meaning. Who gets to say what things mean. Yes, there are messianic visions trying to hold back catastrophe, but Krasznahorkai deflates them with mockery, distance, irony, until salvation and catastrophe collapse into one endless present. The critic Gábor Szabó caught something essential here: that unstable, restless prose that won’t settle down. The decay Krasznahorkai shows us can be read as the death of the sacred. It can be read as theology invading the everyday.

This is a good award in the “if it had to be a European” sense of it.

Isbn

The Evolving Dance: How Germany’s New Right Reads Christian Kracht

or why I am happy Christian Kracht did not win the big award last thursday.

The relationship between Christian Kracht and Germany’s New Right reveals a fascinating case study in literary reception and political appropriation. From enthusiastic embrace to self-aware entanglement, this dynamic has evolved significantly over the past decade. Here is a brief summary.

According to Nicolai Busch’s analysis, the New Right initially read Kracht’s novels through their own ideological lens. Figures like Götz Kubitschek and Martin Lichtmesz interpreted works like Imperium (2012) as expressing a melancholic longing for Germany’s “non-recoverability.” They found in Kracht’s protagonists, who are failed utopians and ironically detached wanderers, perfect metaphors for their own political position: desiring radical change while acknowledging its impossibility.

This reading transformed Kracht’s aesthetic nihilism into fuel for what Busch calls their “anarchic and destructive energy.” The New Right appreciated precisely the ambiguity and failure depicted in these novels, seeing them as validation of their position as eternal outsiders maintaining an “inner realm” against liberal democracy.

A younger cohort of New Right cultural critics, particularly Philip Stein and Volker Zierke of Jungeuropa Verlag, demonstrate a markedly different engagement with Kracht’s work. Their podcast “Von rechts gelesen” (Reading from the Right) has dedicated multiple episodes to Kracht, including discussions of his recent novels Die Toten (2016), Eurotrash (2021), and Air (2025).

What distinguishes their approach is explicit awareness of what they call the “Kracht-Falle” (Kracht trap)—the author’s tendency to “lead critics and readers by the nose” through layers of irony that make any definitive interpretation impossible. Yet they embrace this uncertainty, describing themselves as “distanzlose Fans” (uncritical fans) while acknowledging Kracht might be mocking them.

Most revealing is their interpretation of Kracht’s latest novel Air as potentially “a literary cry for help.” They suggest Kracht has become trapped by his own ironic games: unable to write with genuine meaning because readers expect endless layers of irony. The author who once weaponized ambiguity may now be its prisoner.

This reading positions Kracht’s Paul character -a rootless aesthete seeking authenticity through consumption of artisanal bread and remote locations – as self-critique. The New Right readers recognize themselves in this portrait, yet continue engaging enthusiastically.

The evolution from Kubitschek’s generation to Stein and Zierke’s reveals a shift from ideological appropriation to something more complex: conscious participation in a literary game whose rules potentially mock the players. They understand Kracht offers no stable ground for their political project, yet find in this instability itself a kind of validation.

This presents a paradox: Can one be simultaneously aware of being led “by the nose” and still follow willingly? The New Right’s continued engagement with Kracht suggests they’ve accepted this contradiction as productive—or perhaps inevitable.

Whether Kracht intended this effect remains, characteristically, impossible to determine. But the dance continues, with each partner aware they’re performing steps whose meaning remains perpetually deferred.

David Wellington: The Last Astronaut

Wellington, David (2019), The Last Astronaut, orbit
ISBN 978-0-356-51229-7

David Wellington’s “The Last Astronaut” is a dull and disappointing entry in a time of vibrant and varied science fiction. His language and vision echo Michael Crichton’s repetitive plots of American danger from foreign and alien forces. Wellington offers his readers a surfeit of ideas, draws them into the book only to end on the sourest of notes: having given us a broad range of characters from a variety of backgrounds, we’re left at yet another take on Heart of Darkness.  . It is so very clearly and unambiguously a Kurtz character that it re-orders the experience of reading the entire novel after that. The ability of science fiction to explore ambiguities and ontological possibilities is fully cut short by this simple summary of the story. Furthermore, he trivializes Kurtz to a mere plot device, neglecting the social and historical significance of the original character and his adaptations. The Last Astronaut is not devoid of entertainment value, but it is too long, too superficial, and too self-referential for its own good. It is competent, suspenseful, fine.”

Oh the possibilities! The book starts when an alien object appears in space, on a collision course with earth, an object that is quickly discovered to be some kind of spaceship. It is resistant to attacks, it does not react to any kind of communication, so NASA reactivates its dormant space program, putting the last astronaut it sent into space at the helm of the project. If you’ve seen more than one disaster movie, you know that this relatable, vulnerable character is on a team with a cerebral scientist, a quirky genius and a taciturn military character with some secret task. There’s also a second team, sent up by a company that tries to cut a deal with the aliens for profit. The book tracks the first team’s progress – discovering the object, entering it, slowly figuring out what kind of life and intelligence is at work here. Wellington sets up four very distinct and recognizable genre types, and gives them the right roles in the plot, but he declines to really work with the possibilities inherent in the setup. It is not until the stress of the environment, various injuries and concussions push the team into becoming exaggerated versions of their selves does Wellington really lean into the typology he was making use of the entire time. Much like his characters feel around in a mushy, changing environment, the readers of the novel prod and pry their way through an imprecisely crafted work of genre fiction.

It is clear that Wellington has a basic understanding of the elements he uses and a facility at creating suspense. His description of the unusual environment within the alien spaceship is accomplished and clear, but time and again he comes up short from elevating his work. The Kurtz character is the most glaring example: he’s a member of the for-profit team that competes with the NASA team to establish contact with the aliens. There’s an obvious connection here with Conrad’s Kurtz, an ivory trader, in whom various imperialist and capitalist narratives converge. When Marlowe comes upon Kurtz, he finds him ill, and violent. What’s more, as Peter Firlow notes, Conrad frames his own experience in the Congo as one where he is embracing a larger, fuller consciousness, which, in its various facets, is depicted in the two different experience of Marlowe and Kurtz. Wellington, too, has his Kurtz mingling with, so to say, the natives, embracing a different, broader kind of consciousness. But whereas Conrad’s text, experience, and most of the classic riffs on the subject provide interrogations of the way racism, capitalism and imperialism intersect, Wellington presents a surprisingly clean, color-blind version of the story. There are many writers who used similar bits and pieces without losing either context or implication, most notably Gwyneth Jones, but for Wellington, everything is dropped in favor of a story as clean as white marbled floors. For all the options thrown at us at the beginning, there are no complexities at the end. The solution is physically and actually difficult, but morally, there’s no doubt. Morally, for most of the book, there is only one obvious path. Wellington has taken a genre that has offered difficult moral choices for a century and cleaned it up of all quandaries and problems. It is absolutely vexing why Wellington sets up a novel with so many genre set pieces only to then offer the most anodyne execution of the genre, without even fully using the set pieces (much less subverting them).  

The Last Astronaut is not a bad book, and it is a book for someone who wants a quick and undemanding science fiction ride, but that’s where it ends. It is “The Core” of science fiction disaster movies. Curiously, my edition came with a preview chapter from Megan E. O’Keefe’s Velocity Weapon, which is a much superior take on writing a simple enjoyable science fiction with the building blocks of generic science fiction. 

James Ruddick: Death at the Priory

Ruddick, James (2001), Death at the Priory, Atlantic
ISBN 1-903809-44-4

The Charles Bravo case is a well-known mystery for True Crime enthusiasts. You may have encountered it in one of the countless books or TV shows that explore its details. In 1876, Charles Bravo died of poisoning, and four suspects emerged: his wife Florence (in her second marriage), her housekeeper, her former lover (a distinguished doctor), and a former stableman. None of them were convicted of the murder, but their complex sexual histories were exposed. Agatha Christie called it “one of the most mysterious poisoning cases ever recorded.” The case remains unsolved to this day, and James Ruddick’s book is not a definitive answer, but an (at the time) new addition to the ongoing speculation. This review will be brief, as I have no intention of reading the other 20 books on the subject. I should also note that this book is mainly for those who are unfamiliar with the case, or only know it superficially. If you have already read more than 2000 words on it, or watched a TV show that came out after this book, you can skip it. Ruddick’s writing is good, and the structure is excellent, but the main merit of this book is the presentation and organization of the facts. This is no Alias Grace, but a concise 200-page account of a fascinating case.

That said, if you, like me, are new to the cause Charles Bravo – this is an intriguing entry into the historical True Crime canon. There are some drawbacks to the book – the story of a woman’s desperation, repeated abuse, and rape at the hands of two different husbands, and her potential decision to clear up this situation by poisoning the second of the two should not have been written by a white male writer who isn’t particularly attuned to the situation (although he tries). But it is rare to read a book that is written with such a supple and readable prose, while at the same time keeping a tight lid on the proceedings. There is a little narration, a little psychological speculation, and quite a bit of in situ self inserts – but at 200 pages, we are offered the full facts of the case, and a broad (if occasionally misleading) summary of the various theories. Ruddick’s final explanation isn’t different from others already offered, but if you are new to the subject, it makes for engrossing reading, you get a sense of the entire situation, and Ruddick’s personal biases, though enormous and unstated, are so incredibly glaring that they do not block the view of the entire situation.

I will not go into the details of the case and the motives for suspecting any of the usual culprits. But Ruddick’s treatment of the two main suspects reveals his biases. They are the widow and her loyal servant. Ruddick, writing in 2001, provides a sympathetic context for the hardships of Victorian women. He frequently mentions the abuse they endured, especially Florence, Bravo’s widow, and their lack of options. He repeats these contexts after his conclusion. For Ruddick, misogynist abuse is woven into the story. Yet, we read about Florence being raped repeatedly, without Ruddick ever calling it that explicitly. He depicts different types of marital sexual intercourse, but they are all forcible rape, meant to dominate Florence. He even implies that Florence was raped to coerce her into marrying Charles Bravo. His failure to label every sexual act between Bravo and Florence as rape creates complexity and ambiguity where there is none. And there is more: during her first (abusive) marriage, in her 20s, Florence receives treatment, and soon starts an affair with James Gully, the sexagenarian doctor who runs the facility. Florence describes this relationship as consensual, but the ambiguity about the power abuse in the second marriage casts doubt on Ruddick’s ability to assess the consent in this affair.

Here as everywhere else, Ruddick is hesitant to offer a truly fundamental critique of the situation, which also blocks him from seeing other motives for Florence’s housekeeper Jane Cox. Her motives historically tend to be viewed as financial in nature, and Ruddick deals with that, but the alternative is entirely ignored. That alternative consists in seeing her mistress raped regularly and seeing her switch from a situation with dubious consent to a situation with no sexual consent whatsoever, which might work as motivation for someone with a strong sense of community and care. In fact, the connection between the two women, which entirely escaped James Ruddick, is so woven into the material that Shirley Jackson, whose novel We have always lived in the castle is inspired by the Bravo murder case, was troubled by the possibility of having written a lesbian narrative. Ruth Franklin, in her excellent memoir of Jackson, cites a letter, in which Jackson refers to that possibility as a fear of being seen (even by herself) as a lesbian. “[The novel] is about my being afraid and afraid to say so.” Jackson, unintentionally, saw a deeper connection in the case than Ruddick, despite his stated years of research in archives.

That said, the biggest blind spot to the book isn’t in the analysis of the case in the strict sense at all. It is in the overall contextualizing of the sexual politics of it. This would be a bigger essay – but there are some odd asides that Ruddick never follows up on. Jane Cox, the housekeeper, eventually inherits a huge plantation in Jamaica. And she’s not the only character with a family connection to the West Indies. Ruddick, towards the end of the book has a brief chuckle about some coincidences: “The family of James Gully, for instance, owned coffee plantations near Kingston, Jamaica, while Charles Bravo’s family had originated in Kingston and had made their money from exporting the coffee grown by Gully’s grandparents. Later, the Bravos had moved to St Ann’s Bay, which eventually became the home of Mrs Cox and her children.” To Ruddick, this is “random and without meaning.” So of the characters in the book 2 of the 3 men Florence sleeps with are from Jamaica, as well as her housekeeper, commonly seen as a linchpin in the murder. It is incredible that Ruddick at no point discusses the sexual politics of colonialism, the structure and function of colonialist violence as it impacts the bodies of those who are its subjects. And how partaking in colonialism in a colony might affect, change, or determine the mindset of the colonizer as well. To offer that short little paragraph as a summary of funny “coincidences” is incredible.

I don’t think it matters, ultimately, who pulled the trigger, so to say (there’s also a suicide theory, which, if I understand the internet correctly, Ruddick represents very badly and incompletely) – the book, which prides itself on offering a lot of contexts, given the paucity of information available, subtracts from the story the most relevant questions. The way Charles Bravo uses impregnation through rape as a weapon to acquire the fortune of the rich widow Florence is impossible to examine without recourse to the context of his origins in Jamaica. His reaction to the other man in Florence’s life is empty without connection to their shared beginnings in colonialist exploitation in the West Indies. And the role of Jane Cox has to be analyzed in connection with her roots and understanding of the sexual politics of colonialism. A book that has a curiously apropos connection to A Death in the Priory is Jean Rhys’ rewriting of Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys gives us a white immigrant from Jamaica, daughter of impoverished former planters, who is driven to madness by her English husband. The psychology of Antoinette, her situation with regard to class and race, as well as her connection to Grace Poole all offer examples of a complex conversation the ingredients of which are right there in the Charles Bravo murder case.

None of this is offered by Ruddick, who, instead, includes a photo of “the author search[ing] for Cox’s descendants in the West Indies.” His bias is enormous and almost offensively obvious, but because it is so obvious, it does not entirely erase the accomplishments of the book as outlined earlier. He doesn’t obfuscate or hide these biases, and, as with many other books, you just have to do some additional work of your own to level and contextualize his theories. There are many problems with this book, but within the broader context of historical True Crime as a genre, most of which is bad, gullible trash, this is quite decent for what it is. If you don’t know the case, it’s a good read  – and a good jumping off point for more reading.