★ 07/08/2019
Krasznahorkai establishes his own rules and rides a wave of exhilarating energy in this sprawling, nonpareil novel, which harkens back to early works such as Satantango but with the benefit of the Man Booker International Prize winner’s mature powers. In a small Hungarian town, an eccentric and isolated genius known only as the Professor occupies a specially designed hut, ravaged by uncontrollable thoughts and trying to rid himself of “human imbecility” while keeping unsavory watch on his daughter. There will soon be more to watch: the ruined Baron Bela Wenckheim is returning home by train, in flight from his extensive gambling debts, only to fall in with a colorful collection of locals, all looking to take advantage of the Baron by one means or another. There’s the roughneck regulars of the local pub, the scheming town mayor looking to gin up excitement over the Baron’s return for his own visibility, and the con man Dante of Szolnok, whom the Baron encounters casually only to find he has his fingers in any pie from which he can extract a profit. The one bright spot in this Greek chorus of rogues is Marika, the Baron’s childhood sweetheart, whose romantic desires to reunite with the refined boy she remembers will be tested by corrosive new realities. This vortex of a novel compares neatly with Dostoevsky and shows Krasznahorkai at the absolute summit of his decades-long project. Apocalyptic, visionary, and mad, it flies off the page and stays lodged intractably wherever it lands. (Sept.)
"Krasznahorkai's headlong comedy of obsession and wonderful squalor set in small-town Hungary. Majestic."
New York Times Book Review
"A masterpiece, the culminating work of the extraordinary Hungarian writer’s career. The alternation of narrative darkness and radiant syntactical beauty makes this my personal favorite of the year."
KCRW "Best of 2019" - Michael Silverblatt
"The universality of Krasznahorkai’s vision rivals that of Gogol’s Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing."
"His works tends to get passed around like rare currency. One of the most profoundly unsettling experiences I have had as a reader."
The New Yorker - James Wood
"At the end of his life, Baron Wenckheim returns to a small town in Hungary, in search of his lost love. From this, László Krasznahorkai forges a fictional universe populated with rogues and visionaries, at once epic and intimate, apocalyptic and deeply comic. Ottilie Mulzet's remarkable translation captures the density of his extended sentences, their many twists and pivots, and the slow accumulation of their extraordinary intellectual and moral force. Singular and uncompromising, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming is a masterpiece by one of the great writers of our time."
National Book Award Judges' citation
"Krasznahorkai’s novels are less grim than grimoire – books of magic spells that, by their invocation, conjure worlds. It is a turn of great fortune to be alive and to have these novels that are filled to the brim with strange life."
Spectrum Culture - Ian Maxton
"A master of peripatetic, never-ending sentences that brim over with vacillations, qualifications, and false epiphanies."
Hudson Review - Will Harrison
"Krasznahorkai is a pungent delineator of character, and the landscape of his imaginary city is peopled with figures as busy and distinctive as those of a painting by Bruegel. While the novel energetically pursues Krasznahorkai’s habitual themes – disorder, spiritual drought, the impossibility of meaning in the absence of God – it does so in a tone that glitters with comic detail."
The New Statesman - Jane Shilling
"A literary heir to Kafka, Beckett, and Dostoyevsky: Krasznahorkai’s genius has been his ability to absorb the tectonic changes of politics and culture into his singular style. His challenge of despair is applicable under any economic system. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming is his latest, longest, strangest, and possibly greatest novel—suffused with nihilism, but deeply funny. The absurd is more absurd, the incomprehensible more incomprehensible than ever. And yet, though it has its confrontations with despair and nihilism, Wenckheim is the funniest of Krasznahorkai’s novels."
"“I’ve said a thousand times that I always wanted to write just one book. Now, with Baron , I can close this story. With this novel I can prove that I really wrote just one book in my life. This is the book—Satantango , Melancholy , War and War , and Baron . This is my one book.”"
Paris Review Interview - László Krasznahorkai
"Krasznahorkai’s interminable sentences flood the characters in their personal voids."
10 Dystopian Novels in Translation - Electric Literature - Mandy-Suzanne Wong
"László Krasznahorkai’s masterpiece—a manic Greek chorus that infuses festive Technicolor into his multifaceted, bleak vision. Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming calls into question our acceptance of the crippling status quo, delivering universal truths in a way that few books can anymore. It is precisely the novel we need in these difficult, foreboding times. His funniest and most profound book and, quite possibly, also his most accessible."
"In Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming the Hungarian maestro Krasznahorkai is on peerless form. Twinkling with dark wit, his dizzyingly torrential sentences (heroically translated by Ottilie Mulzet) forever bait us with the promise of resolution. It's hard to think of anything comparable to the crazed abundance on show here; as a portrait of epistemological derangement –AKA fake news– it hits the mark as well as any more hidebound attempt to catch the zeitgeist."
The Observer - Anthony Cummins
"If you’re a fan of Krasznahorkai, you already know that you need to read this one: the final volume in his four-part series, in which the aging Baron Bela Wenckheim proceeds home to Hungary, to the highly absurd town of his birth."
Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2019 - LitHub - Emily Temple
"With an immense cast and wide-ranging erudition, this novel, the culmination of a Hungarian master's career, offers a sweeping view of a contemporary moment that seems deprived of meaning."
"The Hungarian master of the apocalypse."
"A vision of painstaking beauty."
"The sentences are gloriously funny, intricate, moving, absurd, funny again, and they trip along like rain and lightening and a rattling train, and they start and stop and deviate in ways that I find enthralling...I’m speed-crawling through it on my hands and knees like a happy infant, giggling and farting my way through the subclauses and the spirals and the damp Hungarian undergrowth. I don’t want it to end. It is of course entirely about Hungary, and Hungarian people and Hungarian things. But Hungarian things are the things of the world. There may as well be no place other than Hungary."
"One of the most mysterious artists now at work."
"Krasznahorkai's fictions emit a recognizably entropic music. His novels—equal parts artful attenuation and digressive deluge—suggest a Beckettian impulse overwhelmed by obsessive proclivities. The epic length of a Krasznahorkai sentence slowly erodes its own reality, clause by scouring clause, until at last it releases the terrible darkness harbored at its core. Baron Wenkcheim’s Homecoming is a fitting capstone to Krasznahorkai’s tetralogy, one of the supreme achievements of contemporary literature."
Paris Review Daily - Dustin Illingworth
"Krasznahorkai's world falls apart along manmade fault lines. Fascinating."
WINNER OF THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE
2019-07-01The World Goes On , 2017, etc.), who blends his trademark interests in philosophy and apocalypse.
The baron of the title is an "unspeakably elegant" member of the erstwhile Habsburg nobility of Hungary who has been living in exile in Argentina until, finally, his debts at the casino catch up to him. Nostalgic and elderly, though still given to dandyish ways, he returns to the countryside haunts of his youth, hoping along the way to rekindle a long-ago romance with a woman whom, late in the story, a factotum likens to Cervantes' Dulcinea del Toboso. The baron is no Quixote, though the Hungary to which he returns has no end of windmills against which to tilt—including oil derricks everywhere. Krasznahorkai fills his pages with knowing nods to European nationalism: An Austrian train conductor, for instance, sniffs that "even they"—the Hungarians on the other side of the border—"had been trying to conform to European standards" when it came to safety, schedule, and other things train conductors are supposed to worry about. The baron cuts a memorable figure, but the real star of Krasznahorkai's story is a philosopher who has cut himself off from society and lives in hermitage in a forest park, concerned with problems of being and nonbeing: "Everything is a kind of philosophical boxing match that leads only to non-existence, and this is, in all likelihood, the greatest error of existence." Even the erstwhile professor has his prejudices, grumbling along with the townsfolk about the gypsies who have dared pitch their own camp nearby. Krasznahorkai tends to long, digressive passages that build on and allude to other pieces, and the word "non-existence" turns up often enough to suggest a theme. But no matter: In the end, the worlds the philosopher, the baron, and other characters inhabit are slated to disappear in a wall of flame, an apocalypse that, as Krasznahorkai assures, is not just physical and actual, but also existential.
A challenge for readers unused to endless sentences and unbroken paragraphs but worth the slog for its wealth of ideas.
