A dark, haunting masterpiece by the author of The Melancholy of Resistance and Seiobo There Below
Now in paperback, Satantango, the novel that inspired Béla Tarr’s classic film, is proof that the devil has all the good times. Set in an isolated hamlet, the novel unfolds over the course of a few rain-soaked days. Only a dozen inhabitants remain in the bleak village, rank with the stench of failed schemes, betrayals, failure, infidelity, sudden hopes, and aborted dreams. “Their world,” in the words of the renowned translator George Szirtes is “rough and ready, lost somewhere between the cosmic and tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death.” Into this world comes, it seems, a messiah…
A bleakly absurdist, voluptuously written saga of abject disintegration on the muddy nowheresville of the Hungarian puszta, Satantango had a sardonic prescience. Supposedly structured on the forward-backward steps of the tango, the novel glides from one consciousness to another, ultimately revealed as a kind of Mobius strip. —J. Hoberman
Librería del balcón 