The price of glory

Nothing could be more offensive than to consider a literary work a difficult construct. And yet this common dictum is cited like a sentence inscribed on a tombstone. As if the author's aesthetic intelligence should submit to the indolence, laziness, and boredom of a helpless reader wandering in search of relief and consolation.

What we celebrated in the work of László Krasznahorkai, when we awarded him the Formentor Prize for Literature last year , was precisely the genius that throbs in his novels: the powerful imagination that reveals hidden worlds, unnoticed spheres, and the seminal breath that expands the unprecedented dimensions of reality. Let no one confuse creative imagination with the gambling addiction of illusion.

“His powerful imagination reveals hidden worlds, unnoticed spheres.”

The novelistic fiction conceived by László Krasznahorkai's emancipated literary imagination refuses to reduce the human condition to its functionalist caricature and unfolds the unprecedented complexity of an existence fully intuited, probed, and contemplated. The Hungarian author acts, operates, as the goldsmith of latent worlds, those that reverberate in the landscape renewed by the imaginative mind. We can recognize in László's work the merits we attribute to what we call the revisited novel: it gives narrative form to a trembling premonition, a sibylline consciousness, a strange intelligence.

The saturated production of cultural artifacts, manufactured for the consumption of a multitude addicted to the relentless supply of novelty, to the inexhaustible first fruits digested according to the gastric model of bulimia, leads a confused and exhausted public to cognitive collapse. László's work casts aside this burden and prolongs the origins of the novelistic tradition. Instead of reiterating the narrative resources of sentimental anguish and consoling the vital dystrophy of the dispossessed man, the novel revisited by László infuses a disturbing suspicion and takes the reader beyond the limits imposed by the industrial conventions of culture.

László's literary epic penetrates the obscured dimensions of reality and undertakes the mission that the contemporary novel has forgotten: to renew the primitive vastness of the world.

If any reader were wondering which Laszló book they should start reading, I would recommend against choosing. His titles comprise a single work, and it is in this complexity that they should immerse themselves. Without expecting anything in return.

The character we see speaking in *Isaiah Has Come* is leaning against a bar, somewhat drunk and agitated. Korin tells the stranger sitting impassively on his stool, smoking, how a decisive change in world history took place. Korin asks, as if talking to himself, why nobility became extinct in the world and where the noble, the exalted, and the magnificent have gone. One of the most singular mysteries of human history, he said, was the appearance and disappearance of nobility in history. What brought us to this situation, he added, was the irresistible power of reason, and it was the storm unleashed by reason that swept away everything on which the world had been based until then. The tragic overturning of our world, Korin continued, is not due to supernatural forces or divine judgments, but to an incomparably repugnant conglomeration of men. The Enlightenment emerged as a phantasmagorical force and suddenly made men understand that neither God nor men existed, and thus we ended up languishing in a world where “the price of glory can only be infamy.”

Read also

László's work unfolds with the undulating periphrasis of an elliptical circumambulation, a literary parable that ignites overlapping narrative planes, encompassed by the simultaneity of analogical thought. The resonances, concordances, and symmetries that run through his writing shape the singular geography of a revisited hero. The memory of a world permeated by the tenuous atmosphere of its dreamlike twilight.

The totality of László's work, its enigmatic composition, the existential immensity of consciousness, the majestic magnitude of what is sublimated by language, the adorned arrogance of writing—all belong to the literary expectation he has revisited and renewed in this moment of fracture, collision, and confusion of the dark tedium of life. László's literature conjures the miasma of the shattered contemporary narrative and confirms Adorno's prediction: "The injustice committed by all pleasurable art, and especially that of pure entertainment, is against the dead, against accumulated and wordless pain."