The book begins with a depressing description of a mucky, failed collective farm in Hungary. Thomas Kahn describes it in the Los Angeles Review of Books ( here), the final chapter being “The Circle Closes,” though that chapter title is a bit misleading - the circle both closes and begins again. It’s a Rorschach test, in which we dig into the characters’ psyches, blur their perspectives of events, see into ourselves. Or, perhaps even more aptly, a Möbius strip, as K. Its chapters count from 1 to 6 and then from 6 to 1. The structure of Satantango mimics a tango, which takes six steps forward and then six steps back, essentially taking us right back where we began. In this world, the end would be redundant. It could be about the end of the world, but that’s not quite right. I used this phrase to describe Krasznahorkai’s Animalinside and it works just as well here: it’s a beautiful nightmare. It’s somehow all of those things as well as exhilarating.
It’s dank, isolating, mad, hopeless - I enjoyed it so much I read it twice for this review. Satantango is Krasznahorkai’s debut novel, famously (in some circles) made into a 7-hour movie by Hungarian auteur Bela Tarr.
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