Satantango
About this book
Translated into English by George Szirtes.
Winner of the Best Translated Book Award 2013
In the darkening embers of a Communist utopia, life in a desolate Hungarian town has come to a virtual standstill. Flies buzz, spiders weave, water drips and animals root desultorily in the barnyard of a collective farm. But when the charismatic Irimias - long-thought dead - returns to the commune, the villagers fall under his spell. The Devil has arrived in their midst.
Irimias will divide and rule: his arrival heralds the beginning of a period of violence and greed for the villagers as he sets about swindling them out of a fortune that might allow them to escape the emptiness and futility of their existence. He soon attains a messianic aura as he plays on the fears of the townsfolk and a series of increasingly brutal events unfold.
Satantango follows the villagers as they are exploited and taken in by Irimias; as they drink and stumble their way toward the gradual realization of their mistake and ultimate demise. In its measured prose and long, Tolstoyan sentences, Satantango is nothing short of a literary masterpiece; a formal meditation on death and avarice, human fallibility and faith.
Publishers
- Original publisher English (UK & Commonwealth): Atlantic Books
- Arabic (Egypt): Dar Al Tanweer
- Chinese: Yilin Press
- Croatian: OceanMore
- Danish: Forgalet Sisyfos
- Estonian: Margus Lattick
- Finnish: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Teos
- French: Editions Gallimard
- Greek: Polis
- Hebrew: Babel
- Hindi: Sahita Pravarthaka
- Italian: Bompiani
- Korean: Alma Books
- Norwegian: Cappelen Damm
- Portuguese: Antígona
- Portuguese (Brazil): Editora 34
- Russian: Corpus Books
- Serbian: Dereta
- Slovak: Oz Brak
- Spanish: Quaderns Crema
- Swedish: Norstedts
- Taiwanese: Unitas
- Vietnamese: Nha-Nam
About the author & agent
Other László Krasznahorkai titles
