The book "Satanic Tango" - Laszlo Krasnahorkai

Laszlo Krasnahorkai is a living legend, the most famous modern Hungarian writer and screenwriter, winner of the international Booker Prize and the man who gave the excellent director Bela Tarr the foundations for his films. My acquaintance with him took place six years ago in the film "The Turin Horse", in which he was the author of the script, I consider this film one of the best in the last decade, so now I decided to fill in the gaps of my reading experience and read the most famous work of Krasnakhorkai - the novel "Satanic Tango".

I didn't watch Tarr's film of the same name lasting seven and a half hours, so I had little idea what and what the book would be about, although I guessed that I would have to face something Kafkaesque.

In an abandoned Hungarian collective farm, where the last inhabitants sold everything they could to survive in perestroika times, a rumor is spreading that Irimias, who once left him, has been considered dead for several years, is returning to it. Residents, and these, admittedly, are very strange personalities, hope that he, like a Man from Kemerovo from Boris Grebenshchikov's song, "will come and fix everything in silence," and the grass will turn green again, the sun will shine in the sky and the reclusive doctor will stop thumping for days on the fly and cheerfully run to the meadow to twist cows' tails. And all that.

Reading into the "Satanic Tango" turned out to be terribly difficult, even after reading about 150 pages, I could not tell what was going on here at all and whether it was happening at all. Krasnakhorkai essentially tells some kind of postmodern parable that everything is generally bad, we will all die and nothing can be fixed, kaput, guys, we are doomed.

He is not interested in either descriptions or characters, his thought jumps like a frisky goat, and you feel like a reader on tranquilizers who needs to reread the same paragraph several times to understand who it is written about right now, except that you don't wipe your drooling mouth with a handkerchief.

How one character differs from another is not particularly clear, they only have their Hungarian names that are not very memorable to a Russian person, no history, no "stuffing" in the form of a character, they are such "hollow people" by T. S. Eliot, or "characters-constructs" by Camus.

Although Krasnakhorkai is most often compared to Kafka, in fact there is nothing at all from Kafka's style and language in his novel, the comparison concerns exclusively a pessimistic atmosphere in which neither the characters nor the reader understand anything and are in a kind of prostration, looking at the absurdity of being and seeing that they have no place in it.

In general, in my opinion, it is difficult to find a clearer and more structured style of narration than Kafka's: he has everything laid out on the shelves, and if the reader is attentive, then there should be no problems with understanding. In "Satanic Tango", instead of clarity, some kind of blurriness appears, if you try to find analogues, then I would compare the work with Camus's "Plague", in which they tried to add embellishments so that the chronicle would not be so insipid, and suddenly it became unclear what was really important here, and what was just an artistic device used to revive the narrative.

As for the plot, here, in any case, it seems to me, everything is completely on the surface: in fact, the "Satanic Tango" is an inverted or even turned inside out life of a saint, which was thrown into the same blender with Beckett's "Waiting for Godot". And Godot in this case will really wait.

Actually, the villagers are people waiting for a miracle. In fact, Irimias is miraculously resurrected for them, a saint who should work miracles right and left, but his arrival, instead of giving health to some sick person, brings with it only death, which practically no one notices.

In fact, death has settled in this place for a long time and it is not subject to resurrection: everything is overgrown with cobwebs as soon as any action stops, and the only entertainment of local residents is to spy on each other by looking out the windows. "I hear the bell, but I don't know where it is" - this is straight about the "Satanic Tango": several villagers constantly hear the bell ringing, although there is no church nearby, my interpretation is solely related to the burial of this whole place.

And a false saint, and instead of an angelic choir, only a satanic tango in a tavern...

In addition to the main plot, there are two insert stories in "Satanic Tango", but precisely that "as it were": this is the story of a sick girl who found out that a person can quite go to God on their own, without necessarily waiting for death from old age, and the same drinker of a doctor who just sits and looks out the window.

I advise you to read the second one, if you still do it, especially carefully, so as not to miss a very thick hint that the whole described reality is in fact exceptionally unreal.

My relationship with Krasnakhorkai and his "Satanic Tango" did not work out: at first I didn't understand anything, and when I did, I was somewhat annoyed that there wasn't much to understand, there were a couple of pages of thoughts, but several hundred were written.

But I realized that not everything that is good in the form of a film is also wonderful in the form of a book: I like Tarr's films and Haneke's "White Ribbon", there is something fascinating in them, they are insanely atmospheric, but it is not so much the story being told that is important, as it is how they are made, their visual part, so reading about the same thing turned out to be not at all as interesting as watching.

Probably this is the case when it is important to produce something yourself on the basis of what you read, to be inspired and to create, for me everything ends with a picture in my head and a couple of smart (or not so) thoughts in the same place.