I started reading Satantango without many preconceptions: the cover, designed by Erik Carter and Paul Sahr, caught my eye in the window of McNally Jackson, and then when I saw the book at the library I figured I might as well pick it up. The book, originally published in Hungarian in 1985, is Krasznahorkai’s first novel, though it’s not been translated into English until now. It’s structured in two parts, each consisting of six sections: the sections are numbered I-VI in the first part, and then, moving backward, as VI-I in the second. As others have pointed out, the book has the forward/backward structure of the tango of its title, or of a Möbius strip. The style is what’s immediately striking: Krasznahorkai writes in long sentences, and there aren’t any paragraph breaks within the chapters. The book starts on a restless and rainy morning, with this:
One morning near the end of October not long before the first drops of the mercilessly long autumn rains began to fall on the cracked and saline soil on the western side of the estate (later the stinking yellow sea of mud would render footpaths impassable and put the town too beyond reach) Futaki woke to hear bells. (3)
Futaki, along with most of the rest of the book’s characters, lives on a derelict estate in the middle of nowhere, somewhere in Hungary. The estate’s owners/managers have left, and there’s not much happening: the school has shut down, the buildings are falling to pieces. It’s a world of rain and mud and mildew and decrepitude, cold drafts and broken machinery and not much else:
The doctor thought back to last year’s autumn and to those of earlier years and knew that this was how it would have to be; that, apart from a brief break of sunshine that lasted a few hours, or at most a day or two, it would pour down steadily, without a pause, right until the first frosts so that the roads would become impassable and they would be shut off from the outside world, from town and from the railways; that the constant rain would turn the soil into one enormous sea of mud, and the animals would vanish into the woods the other side of the Szikes, into the narrow park of the Hochmeiss estate or into the overgrown park of Weinkheim Manor because the mud would kill of all forms of life, rot the vegetation and there would be nothing left, just the ankle-deep cart tracks of the end of summer that had filled with water up to your boot tops, and these pools and puddles of water, as well as the nearby canal, would be covered over with frogspawn and reeds and tangled weeds that in the evening or early twilight, when the moon’s dead light reflected off them, would glitter all over the body of the land like a galaxy of tiny silvery blind eyes gazing up at the sky. (63-64)
But early in the book, there’s suddenly hope: there’s news that Irimiás—who seems to have been sort of the estate manager, and has been presumed to be dead—has returned. There’s lots on themes of resurrection and salvation, or else the opposite—damnation, deceit, false hopes. The plot is sometimes muddled, sometimes hazy, but basically, at the start, Futaki and others are scheming to somehow leave, to start over elsewhere, but Irimiás’s arrival makes them change their plans.
The narrative switches its focus from chapter to chapter, sometimes focusing on an individual character—like Futaki, the engineer with a lame leg who’s the smartest of the bunch, or the religious Mrs. Halics (who made me think of Jeanette Winterson’s descriptions of Mrs. Winterson in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?—the two share a fondness for the book of Revelation), or the alcoholic Dr. Benda, who watches his neighbors from his window and records everything in a series of notebooks—and sometimes focusing on the whole group of them. The characters are all fairly miserable and fairly desperate, but there’s humor in their bickering and doubts, and throughout there are striking images, lovely phrases, like “the glug of wine being poured” being followed by the sight of “the tiny momentary pearls of poured wine” (82).
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