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Laszlo Krasznahorkai is one of the few authors I can seriously regard as today carrying on the work of the great modernists. The Melancholy of Resistance is a very hard book to pin down, but if anything it is about the energy, terror, seduction, and appeal of fascism. The book is about a Leviathan-like whale that comes to a town in Hungary, and how the spectacle of it exerts power over the masses and is used by the powers that be. Krasznahorkai’s long sentences are frequently remarked on, and they are great, but this book also includes a number of surprising and impressive point of view shifts (including one stretch from the consciousness of an angry crowd), as well as the book’s precise use of structure to tell a much larger tale than its size should allow.
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The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
As a die hard Bela Tarr fan, I’ve been meaning to dive into Krasznahorkai for some time…if you haven’t yet seen WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES, you’re in for a treat. We’ve done some rather fawning coverage of it over at Reverse Shot:
http://www.reverseshot.com/article/werckmeister_harmonies (about a single shot)
http://www.reverseshot.com/article/14_werckmeister_harmonies (for our best of the Decade feature, where it came in at #14)
But really, all of the Bela/Laszlo collaborations are pretty fantastic.