László Krasznahorkai has won the Booker International Prize
The Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, whose sentences roll out over paragraphs in what his translator George Szirtes has called a “slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type”, has won the Man Booker International prize for his “achievement in fiction on the world stage”.
Chair of judges Marina Warner, the academic and writer, compared Krasznahorkai’s work to Kafka – the author’s own personal literary hero – and Beckett. “I feel we’ve encountered here someone of that order,” she said. “That’s a trick that the best writers pull off; they give you the thrill of the strange … then after a while they imaginatively retune you. So now we say, ‘it’s just like being in a Kafka story’; I believe that soon we will say it’s like being in a Krasznahorkai story.”
Read the report at the Guardian.
Meanwhile Son of Saul, the debut feature by the Hungarian Laszlo Nemes, has been tipped to win a prize at Cannes. Nemes is a former assistant of Bela Tarr, who has adapted Krasznahorkai’s novels Satantango, The Melancholy of Resistance, and others for the screen.
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We used to laugh at people who used umbrellas on sunny days, and now we’ve become those people. It’s Fury Road out there, and you can’t even drive fast because the traffic is at a standstill. Even with an umbrella, five minutes under the sun and your brain starts vaporizing. You can feel your skin crisping and rising off your bones. We were supposed to watch the Don Quixote puppet show at Instituto Cervantes but our systems kept shutting down in the heat so we went home and slept. That’s it, we’re going to hide in our room and think about Budapest until the rains come.
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