Why is New York's literary crowd suddenly in thrall to Hungarian fiction?
The
highly educated aspiring writers of New York are looking beyond the
English-speaking world for their reading fixes. It must be a sign of the
times
guardian.co.uk, Friday 13 July 2012
The other day I attended a reading by the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai. The venue was Housing Works, a charity bookstore in New York's SoHo. The 58-year-old author is, it's fair to say, relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. His first novel, Sátántangó (the third of his works to be translated by the poet George Szirtes), written in the 80s, has just appeared in a handsome edition published by New Directions press. He deals in despair and metaphysical stasis, one part Kafka, one part Beckett, plus a dollop of earthy comedy. In the film world he has received acclaim for his collaborations with the director Béla Tarr, whose work (including a seven-hour adaptation of Sátántangó) often attracts the adjective "uncompromising". In short, this wasn't the sort of event where you'd expect to have to arrive an hour early to get a seat.
The venue was crammed. People were jostling for position on the floor, on the stairs. The crowd was overwhelmingly young, interspersed with a few visible Hungarian emigrés (elderly, formally dressed, disgruntled at the mob scene) and one or two poorly groomed men carrying those bulging, faintly sinister plastic bags that for some reason are the mark of the obsessive cinéaste, the characters who never miss a screening at Anthology Film Archives, and whose London cousins are, at this very minute, loudly shushing someone talking through the credits at the BFI...- continue at The Guardian
--