Yesterday afternoon, as we were recording Three Percent podcast #99, it was announced that L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai had won the 2015 Man Book International Prize, becoming the only the sixth winner of the biennial award, and the first winner since Ismail Kadare in 2005 who doesn’t write in English. <\/p>\n
From the judges:<\/p>\n
\nIn L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai\u2019s The Melancholy of Resistance<\/em>, a sinister circus has put a massive taxidermic specimen, a whole whale, Leviathan itself, on display in a country town. Violence soon erupts, and the book as a whole could be described as a vision, satirical and prophetic, of the dark historical province that goes by the name of Western Civilisation. Here, however, as throughout Krasznahorkai\u2019s work, what strikes the reader above all are the extraordinary sentences, sentences of incredible length that go to incredible lengths, their tone switching from solemn to madcap to quizzical to desolate as they go their wayward way; epic sentences that, like a lint roll, pick up all sorts of odd and unexpected things as they accumulate inexorably into paragraphs that are as monumental as they are scabrous and musical.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
And Marina Warner:<\/p>\n
\nL\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai is a visionary writer of extraordinary intensity and vocal range who captures the texture of present day existence in scenes that are terrifying, strange, appallingly comic, and often shatteringly beautiful. The Melancholy of Resistance<\/em>, Satantango<\/em> and Seiobo There Below<\/em> are magnificent works of deep imagination and complex passions, in which the human comedy verges painfully onto transcendence. Krasznahorkai, who writes in Hungarian, has been superbly served by his translators, George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n