Customer Reviews

The Melancholy of Resistance

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Hungarian author uses deep metaphor to set quest for meaning in a world of political struggle, chaos, and greed - Difficult and intensely rewarding. Definitely not an easy read. The basic story is of a small contemporary Hungarian town. Work is scarce and society is disintegrating, when a strange circus touting the world's greatest whale arrives and draws a large and dangerous crowd of unemployed men. This is the book that the Hungarian film, the 'Werkemeister's Harmonies' was based upon. While that was an extraordinary movie, the book surpasses it in depth and nuance.

This is the book that is the basis for Bela Tarr's brilliant film Werckmeister Harmonies. The script for the film was co-written by the author, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, and the book is the equal of the film, and also compliments it. Laszlo and Bela Tarr have a very unique relationship, in that all of Bela's later films were co-written by Laszlo, and some were based on his novels (like the epic Satantango). This book is typed as if it were one epic sentence (with a few breaths here and there), conjuring up language and a scope worthy of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy (2 of my favorite writers). There is an amazing sense of dread and drifting in the cosmos contained in these pages (and in the film as well). In most modern novels, you don't really get that sense of the epic and the scope associated with works like this. Laszlo Krasznahorkai is one of my favorite modern authors, and I hope that more of his work becomes available here.

The Melancholy of Resistance doesn't so much clear up the mystery of Bela Tarr's haunting film Werckmeister Harmonies, as much as add to the complexity of the ideas explored in both. For a book and film to echo each other in such an enigmatic way is striking. While the film is frightening and devastating on a gut level, The Melancholy of Resistance is, on an intellectual level, more frightening and utterly devastating...until the end, the very end, the last two pages in fact. And they aren't a sleight of hand magic or clever plot twist, but a cold look at plain facts as if someone turned on the light suddenly and no ghosts were there. The ending certainly qualifies the book but voids nothing at all. If anything, it prompts a second reading.

The novel is written from four different points of view, that of Janos Valuska, Mrs. Plauf (Janos's mother), Eszter and Mrs. Eszter (Aunt Tunde), and skirts themes of chaos/order, Nazism, Sovietism, atheism, and their teeter-totter through history. Krasznahorkai's faulknerian sentences are like a wind at the back of a raging fire, yet there are so many conversational, almost comic asides (and maybe this is due in some part to the translation) that the effect is like being in a speeding car. Very enjoyable if you don't drive over the cliff.

A fantastical nightmare of a book. Krasznahorkai has conjured an allegorical world of deceit, anarchy, and nascent fascism. This is the story of a small and deteriorating village in Hungary which is visited by a circus, a circus which purports to have the world's largest whale. Soon, the floodgates of chaos are opened, and Krasznahorkai discloses a world dominated by fear and violence. This is a novel of the political and literary spectacle-it is haunted by such classical tropes as the Leviathan, the naďve and goodhearted simpleton, and terror of the crowd. The prose flows in extended and spiraling sentences reminiscent of Bernhard. It belongs to a brief list of the most impressive and serious of modern novels. Not too be missed.

Extraordinary writer. This is the best book I have read in years. Other reviews have captured the spirit of the book better than I can. It has so many layers to it: psychological, epistemological, political, existential. It is an astonishing text.

An astonishing book by an an astonishing author, who has won many prizes in Europe but is hardly known here in the U.S., partly because only two of his novels have been translated (the other is "War and War"; Satantango will be out in February 2012). I was led to the this book by Bela Tarr's great film "Werckmeister Harmonies". As one reviewer notes, the book fills in some details that clarify issues in the film, but it does more than that. It is a devastating masterpiece in its own right.