31 January 2011 War and War – Klasznahorkai in Polish
For the 2nd February, the W.A.B. Publishing House announced the premiere of a book by "contemporary, Hungarian master of apocalypse", László Krasznahorkai, whom we welcomed at the second Conrad Festival. The plot of War and War takes place in Hungarian province. György Korim, the protagonist of the book, is an archivist on the verge of paranoia. On his 44th birthday he finds a mysterious manuscript and decides to save it from oblivion. Krasznahorkai plays a refined game with the reader; he employs history, philosophy, metaphysics, reality and myth. War and War is a story of loneliness, fascination, madness. Gloomy, escaping rules of logic tale of collapse of the world. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described Krasznahorkai as follows: “As if Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard joined their forces to create a surreal phantasmagoria of absurdity".
The protagonists of his novel are marginal, poor, rejected, lost in their incompatibility with destructive machine of consumerism, overpowered by the system and falseness that ruins man. They are unable to find their places in the world; they either run from themselves or wait for a miracle. The reader is lost in the labyrinth of long, stretched over several pages, sentences. His writing is sometimes compared with works of Adám Bodor, the author of The Sinistra District. We strongly encourage you to read the book.
Laszlo Klasznahorkai (1954) – a Hungarian writer, author of screen plays, one of the most outstanding contemporary Hungarian writers, the winner of the Kossuth Prize. Two of his novels have been published in Poland: Satantango (1985, 2004) and Melancholy of Resistance (1989, 2007) and, the prepared at the moment, War and War. At the 2nd International Joseph Conrad Literature Festival, together with Mirosław Bałka, one of the most renowned Polish artists in the world, he participated in the meeting titled Melancholy of Resistance.
