The Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, Formentor Prize for Literature 2024 | Culture | EUROtoday

The author László Krasznahorkai (Gyulia, Hungary, 70 years outdated) will obtain the Formentor Prize for Letters 2024 as introduced this Saturday. The jury awards the prize “for sustaining the narrative power that envelops, reveals, hides and transforms the reality of the world, for expanding the fictional version of the enigmatic human existence, for calling for the vigorous reading of a complex fable and for constructing the fascinating labyrinths of the literary imagination. In previous editions the award had been received by Pascal Quignard, Liudmila Ulítskaya, Annie Ernaux, Cesar Aira, Javier Marías or Mircea Cărtărescu.

Krasznahorkai is a regular in the Nobel pools and his figure has been surrounded by some mystery: he is not given to granting interviews and at the beginning of his career there are those who thought that the writer simply did not exist. Some of his works are satanic tango (his first novel, from 1985), War and war o The melancholy of resistanceall of them published in Spain by Acantilado and translated by Adam Kovacsis.

Some of them have been brought to the screen by the filmmaker Béla Tarr, with whom he has been a close collaborator since 1988. His version of satanic tango It is a seven-hour long cult film. The work recounts “the coexistence and connivance of a handful of human beings confined to a harsh land and condemned to a miserable life in which the apocalypse is a daily occurrence,” in accordance with critic Javier Aparicio Maydeu on this newspaper. “Premonitions, reproaches, resentments, the seven capital sins of moral ruin, boredom, darkness and unease,” he added.

Son of the Jewish bourgeoisie, he has been in contrast with Kafka or Thomas Bernhard, with Gogol or Bulgakov, he has been a pal of Allen Gingsberg or Imre Kertész, he was acclaimed by Susan Sontag and WG Sebald, he’s thought-about troublesome and demanding, oppressive and dystopian, postmodern and tragicomic, and all the time attire in black. “The work of our winner encompasses in its elliptical and delayed evocation the dark, beautiful and melancholic landscapes of the soul, the abrupt cartography of the sinuous human pilgrimage and the secret murmurs of a self-absorbed premonition,” explains the jury's minutes.

In an interview with this newspaper in 2022, the author, who received the Man Booker International Prize in 2015 (for his “visionary” character), criticized modern acceleration, rooted in technological hyperdevelopment. “Our awareness of time accelerates. We receive an impressive amount of information and it arrives so quickly that it means nothing. It takes time,” he stated. And he additionally denounced that, within the welfare society, individuals are avoided what’s actual. “We have less and less relationship with reality and more and more with what some say about it. If I find out that there has been an accident on the corner it may not mean anything, but if someone collapses in front of me and is bloody, that will stick in my mind,” the Hungarian mirrored.

Furthermore, he denounced how this disconnection with actuality, and perpetual reference to screens, is annihilating historical traditions, an amassed information that can not be transmitted by way of the smartphone. The apprentice carpenters within the temples of Japan exemplify that there are issues that may solely be realized by way of direct expertise. “The teacher picks up a brush and makes two or three movements before passing it to the student to repeat for the rest of the day. When he finishes he tells her that it is wrong, and the next day he will do the same. If the learner asks how to do it right, he will err because there is no answer. The only thing to do is imitate, imitate, imitate until the teacher agrees that it is okay,” Krasznahorkai stated.

“I write about people who have experienced and lived all that, not about myself. There are much more interesting people than me. If you don't understand this you won't be able to be a novelist. Talking about yourself is something you do with your wife or your ex-wife, and each one will tell their own truths,” he added.

The oriental, as you may see, is without doubt one of the creator's pursuits, and he defined it throughout a go to to Barcelona in 2006, to current his work. To the north the mountain, to the south the lake, to the west the street, to the east the river, whose title alludes to the traditional artwork of feng shui, which narrates the seek for a legendary Japanese backyard of incomparable magnificence and whose origin is in a keep in Kyoto, the place the creator felt a robust impression by classical Japanese tradition.

“I'm not one of those who dreamed of going to the East as a child, because I couldn't imagine that I was going to leave that horrible country where I was born,” he stated then. When he lastly arrived in Japan, he discovered “an incredibly subtle form of beauty and in great abundance,” a need for magnificence so intense “that it was like an infection from paradise, it infected everything.”

In 2018, the creator gave a chat on the Madrid Student Residence. There he defined why, though his prose has poetic musicality, he didn’t develop into a poet. “I chose the novel and the essay because they seem to me to be genres that are closer to the objective, however, in what I write, I let music and poetry penetrate, which are fundamental parts of my life,” he said then.