They’re free to leave - and Futaki has been planning to leave “any day now.” This freedom, though, is paralyzing. They’re free from whatever oppression they suffered while the estate was running. 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 the footpaths impassable and put the town too beyond reach) Futaki woke to hear bells.įutaki is one of the few remaining residents of this estate, abandoned and forgotten. 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.

László krasznahorkai satantango