Long stretches of the novel lie there, slow and exhausting, like call waiting, drone music, middle age. Twinkling with dark wit, his dizzyingly torrential sentences (heroically translated by Ottilie Mulzet) forever bait us with the promise of resolution. In just a few pages, he touches on the concept of the infinite, fear as the birth of culture, the cowardice of atheism, and the pervasiveness of human illusion ... His fiction’s recursive darkness can obscure its ambiguous grace. Gypsies, Albanian gangs, mangy outsiders, polluters of pure Hungary: described in the language of flotsam and filth, they lurk at the edge of the text, cast out from their pasts but unable to get a purchase on a stable future, as displaced and dislocated in their fashion as the more central characters. Maybe you have to read the previous three books to enjoy this one. Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2020. Much of the humour is directed at the burghers of the provincial town where the Baron and the Professor have landed up. Reviewed in the United States on December 19, 2019. "The finale comes as a sobering surprise, opening wide a novel that has contrived to feel at once capacious and claustrophobic...", "a slim novel with the heft of a much larger one...", "as ever, the sole, unrivalled champion of the average man...", "A new Grisham legal thriller is always an event, but this one is exceptional...", "At each turn, Barry makes his fiction a matter of life and death....", "Back then he was better at writing about now...", "the story opens out into a commentary on recent Irish history...", "The narrative control of this novel simply dazzles...", "The musician and writer’s second novel is the self-mocking tale of how a girl like her escaped from Norway’s Bible Belt...", "told in the second person ... it feels distant after the close first person narrative of the previous books...", Daisy Johnson, Kirsty Logan, Emma Glass, Eimear McBride, "an engaging anthology that breathes new life into old stories...", "Ley’s crisp, witty writing keeps it firmly on the right side of mawkishness...", "I can’t wait to see how Rebus deals with Covid and Brexit...", "Wildly inventive, Turton’s tale defies definition as either historical fiction or crime novel, but provides all the pleasures of both genres...", "a curious book, not always convincing in its recreation of 1880s London, but certainly compelling...", "There are glimpses of Tremain at her best in a passionate tale of coloniser and colonised in the British empire...", "Banville provides the twists of a mystery plot in his characteristically lucid, elegant prose...", "her story offers a glimpse of the redemptive power of love amid the inhumanity...", "The Living Sea of Waking Dreams at its best when it balances its vehemence with its beauty, when it leaves space for the reader to wander and wonder...", "a mystery infused with the spirit of a Western...", "I read slowly, not wanting my book to end...", "Lisbon during the Second World War is a locale underexplored by writers...". Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (translated by Ottilie Mulzet, review copy courtesy of Tukar Rock Press and the Australian distributor Allen & Unwin) is set in a run-down provincial town in Hungary, where the Mayor clings to power thanks to the indulgence of the Police Chief, and a motorcycle gang, the Local Force, keeps an eye on any unwelcome intrusions from the outside world. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he longs to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart Marika. Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming is the latest of Krasznahorkai's works to be translated into English, in this instance by Ottilie Mulzet. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Review by JE Suarez . Worthy and Intriguing if You Can Deal With the Excessively Long Sentences, Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2020.

Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming. There’s no strong redemption, and the tone is black with ignorance melted down to absurdity. The baron cuts a memorable figure, but the real star of Krasznahorkai’s story is a philosopher who has cut himself off from society and lives in hermitage in a forest park, concerned with problems of being and nonbeing: “Everything is a kind of philosophical boxing match that leads only to non-existence, and this is, in all likelihood, the greatest error of existence.” Even the erstwhile professor … Not even 600 pages, it’s both too long and – in this era of rolling news and data dumps – far too short. Translated by Ottilie Mulzet. Make no mistake, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming is gloomy, frequently inert, boring, frustrating. The petty narcissism of local officials and the baron’s propensity for Thomas Bernhard-like vitriol regarding his native country are among the pleasures of this great work. Sign up to get the best reviewed books of the week delivered every Monday morning - After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Told in a breathless cascade of sprawling sentences, his madly overstuffed and essentially nihilistic vision offers pleasure of a different order, if that’s a word to be seen within a mile of his work. Hungarian-born László Krasznahorkai, winner of the 2015 Man Booker international prize and best known for Satantango (1985), later made into a legendarily dour seven-hour film of the same name by Béla Tarr, has described it in summative terms: “I’ve said it a thousand times that I always wanted to write just one book … with Baron, I can close this story.”. Reviewed in the United States on September 12, 2020. he runs afoul of a biker gang, from whom he must flee for his life. Krasznahorkai has written an occasionally humorous, often thoughtful, philosophical diatribe propelled by (routinely) chapter-long sentences. I slugged through it, but cannot say that I enjoyed myself at all. A positive rating based on 10 book reviews for Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Trans. • Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai (translated by Ottilie Mulzet) is published by Tuskar Rock (£20). They are everywhere – or at least they seem to be. Its “story”, if indeed it can be called that, involves the sexagenarian Baron Wenckheim returning in the present day, after a gap of more than 40 years, to the Hungarian town where he was born, during which time he has racked up huge gambling debts in Buenos Aires. The story can go for pages and pages without a single period, reading like a long, extremely repetitive, rant. Review: Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming Amazon : From Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming, by László Krasznahorkai : he could hardly even remember that he had a daughter at all, who, as people tended to put it, was 'from the wrong side of the blanket,' he'd forgotten about her, or, to put it more precisely, he'd learned not to think about her, at least when he was able to do so, there were periods — even if … Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai review – mesmerisingly strange. Even as he teases, maligns, and undermines his characters, he remains empathetic to their plights and blind spots, for he knows that even the most evil deeds are conjured by brokenness ... sections flow easily as Krasznahorkai’s meandering prose swaps points of view at each paragraph break, allowing his characters’ opinions to mesh and conflict. The Professor's specialty, natural science, is key to the somewhat mercurial action of the story, such as it is, with its long streams of self-interrogation and due reflection. The social panorama drawn by Krasznahorkai around the Baron is counterpointed with the strange tale of the Professor, a reclusive world expert on moss. Meáin Náisiúnta Seirbhíse Poiblí na hÉireann. He wants to link up again with Marika, the girl he loved as a youth. by Ottilie Mulzet Immigrants represent the novel’s background noise. • Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, is published by Tuskar Rock (RRP £20). Krasznahorkai, though he’s often presumed to be a miserabilist, Mitteleuropan chiliast, is a very funny writer. The only exception is Marika, the Baron’s childhood sweetheart, who harbours thoughts of being reunited with him. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users. The emotional and psychological realizations Krasznahorkai can evoke are singular and breathtaking ... As the world seeks to reduce and streamline communication, and as our attention spans are attenuated by our thirst for digital-world dopamine-hits.

By Laszlo Krasznahorkai. by Caroline Schmidt, Nicolas Mathieu, Trans. Exhilaratingly out of step with most contemporary fiction, it’s closer in spirit to Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, a novel whose syntactic difficulty creates a literary no man’s land for intrepid readers to yomp through. Check out the work of this highly idiosyncratic Hungarian novelist, beginning perhaps with the hugely accessible The Last Wolf. I don't read novels that often because I find them too long. Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai is the kind of figure who seems as likely to inspire scoffing scepticism as prostrate wonder. along with news, insight and charts from the BIM database. by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Trans. It's a great stew of story, satire, surrealism and silliness. You can still see all customer reviews for the product. Yet it has a madness and monomania that compel. Its more vatic passages can feel superfluous (“The world is nothing more than an event, lunacy, a lunacy of billions and billions of events, and nothing is fixed, nothing is confined, nothing graspable, everything slips away if we want to clutch on to it”). Available for everyone, funded by readers. New Directions Publishing, 2019 . Krasznahorkai is a master and the book will provide readers who know what they're getting into with many, many hours of pleasurably slow-paced introspection, mystery, and knockout prose; still, readers who don't know they want this might, I'd guess, be happier starting with a shorter, more self-contained work like the stunning, You Can't Go Home Again (Hungarian style), Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2019.