Satantango

At long last, twenty-five years after the Hungarian genius László Krasznahorkai burst onto the scene with his first novel, Satantango dances into English in a beautiful translation by George Szirtes.Already famous as the inspiration for the filmmaker Béla Tarrs six-hour masterpiece, Satantango is proof, as the spellbinding, bleak, and hauntingly beautiful book has it, that the devil has all the good times. The story of Satantango, spread over a couple of days of endless rain, focuses on the dozen remaining inhabitants of an unnamed isolated hamlet: failures stuck in the middle of nowhere. Schemes, crimes, infidelities, hopes of escape, and above all trust and its constant betrayal are Krasznahorkais meat. At the center of Satantango, George Szirtes has said, is the eponymous drunken dance, referred to here sometimes as a tango and sometimes as a csardas. It takes