Satantango László Krasznahorkai
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Translated by George Szirtes
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288 pages, $25.95
The story of this contemporary Hungarian classic, first published in 1985 and adapted into one of the most striking films of the 20th century in 1994, is spread over a couple of days of endless rain and focuses on the dozen remaining inhabitants of an unnamed isolated hamlet: failures stuck in the middle of nowhere. “At the center of Satantango,” George Szirtes once said, “is the eponymous drunken dance, referred to here sometimes as a tango and sometimes as a csardas. It takes place at the local inn where everyone is drunk. . . . Their world is rough and ready, lost somewhere between the comic and tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death.”
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