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I think the next major author I’m going to completely fall in love with will be Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Two of his books are available in English from New Directions, and soon two more will be, including what many people have told me is his current greatest work, Satantango.
I mention all this because Waggish has a nice post about AnimalInside a “novella” by Krasznahorkai that was published as part of the excellent Cahiers series from American University of Paris (you can subscribe if you want at that link) and will be published by New Directions in the U.S. next April.
For an introduction to Krasznahorkai I’ll point you to Waggish’s–or rather David Auerbach’s–piece on Krasznahorkai in The Quarterly Conversation, which covers his two books in English, War and War and The Melancholy of Resistance.
Though I’ve only read one thing by Krasznahorkai–a nine-page, one-sentence story in Best European Fiction 2011, which was an excellent story–I’ve heard or read so many good things about him from people I trust that I’d be surprised if I didn’t like him. I still have a few things I’m trying to work through before the end of the year, but I think I’ll be getting into him big time in 2011.
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Sounds great. I’d also recommend his film collaborations with Bela Tarr, which are some of the more remarkable films in modern cinema, with their incredibly long shots designed to mimic Krasznahorkai’s sentence structure.
Agree with Travis – it’s hard to top the Satantango/Werkmeister/Damnation trilogy as the best cinema of the past 25 years.
War without War is good, but I can’t imagine reading Melancholy after the adaptation of Werkmeister. Those images would overrun anything on the page.
Krasznahorkai is my favorite living novelist based on “Melancholy.” Naturally Waggish was the one who pushed him on me!