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In the darkening embers of a Communist utopia, life in a desolate Hungarian town has come to a virtual standstill. Flies buzz, spiders weave, water drips and animals root desultorily in the barnyard of a collective farm. But when the charismatic Irimias - long-thought dead - returns to the commune, the villagers fall under his spell. The Devil has arrived in their midst. Irimias will divide and rule: his arrival heralds the beginning of a period of violence and greed for the villagers as he sets about swindling them out of a fortune that might allow them to escape the emptiness and futility of their existence. He soon attains a messaianic aura as he plays on the fears of the townsfolk and a series of increasingly brutal events unfold. Satantango follows the villagers as they are exploited and taken in by Irimias; as they drink and stumble their way toward the gradual realization of their mistake and ultimate demise. In its measured prose and long, Tolstoyan sentences, Satantango is nothing short of a literary masterpiece; a formal meditation on death and avarice, human fallibility and faith.

Reviews

'The universality of Krasznahorkai's vision rivals that of Gogol's Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing.' W.G. Sebald 'An inexorable, visionary book by the contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse who inspires comparison with Gogol and Melville. Krasznahorkai's novel is both an anatomy of desolation, desolation at its most appalling, and a stirring manual of resistance to desolation - through inwardness.' Susan Sontag 'A masterpiece of modern European literature. Brilliant, unforgiving, gripping. Essential reading for anyone wishing to comprehend the dark heart of the 20th century.' Alex Preston, author of This Bleeding City 'I fell in love with the fierce, barbed intelligence in his sentences... Krasznahorkai is the kind of writer who at least once on every page finds a way of expressing something one has always sensed but never known, let alone been able to describe.'Nicole Krauss 'Like something far down the periodic table of elements, Krasznahorkai's sentences are strange, elusive, frighteningly radioactive. They seek to replicate the entropic whirl of consciousness itself... Haunting, pleasantly weird and, ultimately, bigger than the worlds they inhabit.'Jacob Silverman, New York Times Book Review 'Regarded as a classic, [Satantango] is a monster of a novel: compact, cleverly constructed, often exhilarating, and possessed of a distinctive, compelling vision... It is brutal, relentless and so amazingly bleak that it's often quite funny. This is an obviously brilliant novel. Krasznahorkai is a visionary writer... The grandeur is clearly palpable.' Theo Tait, Guardian 'Intoxicating and exhilarating, bleak yet beautiful, Satantango is a modern masterpiece that manages to speak both of its time and to transcend it altogether.' Beth Jones, Sunday Telegraph 'This majestic translation finally gives us its inimitable, nightmarish pleasures at first hand.' Sunday Times