Colm Tóibín: Why I set up a printing press to publish Nobel Prize winner Laszlo Krasznahorkai | Laszlo Krasznahorkai

TChristmas Hat – That was almost 20 years ago – I returned from America with news. My friend Daniel Medin had recommended two books to me, both by Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, one called “War and War” and the other “The Melancholy of Resistance.” We also watched some of Béla Tarr’s films, whose screenplays were written by Krasznahorkai. The sense of slow, simmering menace in Werckmeister Harmonies, built on the melancholy of resistance, the lack of easy psychology and clear motivation in the film, and the camera moving like a cat, made it exciting, but not as exciting as the two novels.

I noticed that Krasznahorkai liked the meandering sentence, the complex action, the mild panic directed at the quivering fear felt by his characters, followed, in paragraph after paragraph, by intermittent realizations and other reasons for melancholy or anxiety, and then, with only a comma in between, ironic (even comic) responses to what comes next in the mind. These exceptional sentences were translated by the poet George Zerts with great rhythmic energy.

Krasnahorkai – who this week was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature – is interested in limits, in what might happen if language was pushed beyond what its decent grammar might suggest. Or what would happen if consciousness itself became infinite in its systems and able to multiply and feed on itself before moving forward again. Or what would happen if knowledge, action, memory, or voice could not be easily tamed by narrative. For this reason, he, as a narrator, is fascinated by extremes and the possibility of the end of the world.

It would be a mistake to read the threat in his work as either political or coming from nowhere. His imagination feeds on real fear and real violence. He has a way of making fear and violence seem more real and present, by removing them from a familiar context. He places them in a dark context of his choice. In this way, he is closer to Kafka than to Beckett, but nowhere near either in his interest in and delight in verbal fireworks.

In 2006, when I came home very excited about his work, he had no publisher in the UK. I have read the books in the American editions published by New Directions. The opinion in London was that it was too difficult; No publisher can afford to take that risk. In response, together with literary agent Peter Strauss, I founded Tuscar Rock Press, which, with Profile Books as the parent publisher, aimed to publish writers overlooked by other UK publishing houses.

Once we obtained the copyright to Krasznahorkai’s books, the task was to make them better known. And at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2011, when it appeared, I saw us pushing the door open. In the audience were serious young readers, fans of Tarr’s films, who were already familiar with these novels. All we had to do was find more of them.

In person, Krasznahorkai is thoughtful, almost shy, soft-spoken, and unfailingly polite. He is not talkative or outgoing. So, as I prepared to interview him at the London Review Library in 2012, I wondered how he would answer questions about his background and the roots of his inspiration.

Not well, is the answer. Or perhaps the answer is that there is something wrong with one of the questions.

Looking back, I can see that he said some interesting things. For example, about his novel Satantango: “I had to write just this book and nothing more. You try to write just one book and put everything you want to say in one book.”

Before 1989, he said, “Hungary was a completely unreal, crazy country. Abnormal and intolerable. After 1989, it became normal and intolerable.” In what he called “Old Hungary,” there was “very great misery—and the mood was incredibly sad and despairing.”

He wasn’t worried about finding readers. “Most of us only need 10, and maybe six on a bad day.”

The problem arose when I asked him about God, what it meant to write a novel that goes beyond the secular, beyond the local or the limited, and reaches into a larger space. “Hmm,” he said. Then he repeated: “Hmmmm.” His comic timing couldn’t be better. He looked at me sadly and said, “The question is great, but I can’t answer it. It’s too difficult for me. I’m not that smart.”

It took Zertes, who joined him on stage, to grapple with the issue: “I know this world better, but it is an apocalyptic world – an apocalyptic world searching for order. The characters are not searching for God, they are searching for their place.”

When it came time for audience questions, Krasznahorkai seemed at ease. Then he put his hands together and looked at the ceiling. Half shaman and half shy showman, as if praying for salvation, he said he was happy to answer questions: “Just begging you, nothing about God.”