By temperament opposites, both crumble as the city is overwhelmed. Events are mostly caught up with a would-be village idiot, Valuska, and the embittered musicologist in retirement, Eszter, who care for each other more deeply than anyone else in the village is capable of. In the two days which occupy much of the book, the author watches rats devour bread, ponders garbage, deconstructs the well-tempered scale, and portrays a bar game where drunks play the sun, earth, and moon in eclipse, all while somehow never losing his concern with what will happen to these hapless people. But Krasznahorkai is fascinated with the resistance a sentence can offer to the passage of time he details events such as the pounding of a nail with insane precision. The story of The Melancholy of Resistance is straightforward: a great truck hauls a stuffed whale into a decrepit town, mayhem follows.
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And he’s no imitator Krasznahorkai’s genius for making the metaphysical material and the material metaphysical is entirely his own.
Yet The Melancholy of Resistance is so completely imagined, so mysteriously compelling and humorous, it recalls Doestoyevsky and Kafka. Unless you stumble across the book by chance, you’re slightly more likely to have seen the movies Satan Tango and Damnation which Bela Tarr made from his novels. Of his five novels, three are in print in Germany (his The General Theseuswon Best Book of the Year award there), but in English there’s only The Melancholy of Resistance. He writes very long sentences, without indenting for paragraphs, in Hungarian. Reviewed by Paul McRandle IT’S NOT ENTIRELY BAFFLING why Laszlo Krasznahorkai has gone ignored in English-speaking countries.
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