Compact, powerful and intense, The Melancholy of Resistance, as its enormously gifted translator George Szirtes puts it, “is a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type.” And yet, miraculously, the novel, in the words of The Guardian, “lifts the reader along in lunar leaps and bounds.”
Eszter, plotting her takeover of the town her weakling husband and Valuska, our hapless hero with his head in the clouds, who is the tender center of the book, the only pure and noble soul to be found. The novel’s characters are unforgettable: the evil Mrs. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find - music, cosmology, fascism. A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumors. The Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai’s magisterial, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. The tightness, the suspense, the sheer weight of the content jumped out at me at once: The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai (1989) translated by George Szirtes (1998, Tusker Rock, Profile Books) Here’s an excellent description that I encountered a few days ago for a very unusual novel that contains both. The distillation of big narratives can be especially challenging if there are philosophical or political elements at play. A clumsy description for even a well-crafted volume can seriously kill the prospect of sales.
I think the summarising of a novel or a collection of stories in one or more short paragraphs is as much an art as the writing of the whole book itself.
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