Krasznahorkai, one of the most important living Hungarian writers, stands out with the stylistic characteristics of his works. The author’s Direnişin Melankolisi, which is described as an “apocalyptic farce”, is shaped around the mysterious circus that comes to a provincial town.
The circus’s only show, a gigantic whale, pits the townspeople against each other and paves the way for the dictatorship of the high-minded Mrs Eszter.
Marina Warner, the jury president of the Booker Prize she won, describes her with the following words: “László Krasznahorkai is a writer of vision, with an extraordinarily dense and wide-ranging voice, who conveys the texture of contemporary life in scenes of startling, startling, wonderfully funny and shocking beauty.”
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LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI was born in Gyula, Hungary in 1954. He studied language and literature in Budapest, then law. He became one of the leading writers of Hungarian literature with his first work in 1985, Şeytan Tangosu, a dystopian novel. Şeytan Tangosu also made cinema history with BélaTarr’s seven-and-a-half-hour black and white film (1994). In 1986, his short story Kegyelmi viszonyok (Af Koşulları) was published. He was abroad during the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. Starting from Germany, he lived in various countries such as the USA, Spain, Greece and Japan. He analysed his experiences in Mongolia and China in Az urgai fogoly (Urga Mahpusu, 1992) and Rombolás és bánat az Ég alatt (Gökyüzünün Altında Yıkım ve Keder, 2004). He has also written Savaş ve Savaş (1999), Direnişin Melankolisi (1993), Északról hegy, Délrl tó, Nyugatról utak, Keletrl folyo (Kuzey Dağı, Güney Gölü, Batı Yolu, Doğu Deresi, 2003) and Seibo Orada, Aşağıdaydı (2008). He has also written screenplays. László Krasznahorkai won the Man Booker International Prize in 2015, becoming the first Hungarian writer to receive this honour.
LEYLA ÖNAL was born in Budapest and grew up in Ankara. She graduated from METU Department of Sociology. During her years as an academic, she participated in various social and cultural meetings between Turkey and Hungary as an interpreter-translator. After taking a break from his academic studies, he started translating contemporary Hungarian literature. In addition to various short stories and children’s books, he translated Kafka’nın Kedileri (Gábor T. Szántó) and Mutlu Kuzey (Árpád Kun) into Turkish. In 2017, he won the Best International Translation Award from the Petőfi Literary Museum and participated in workshops organised by PIM in Hungary and TEDA in Turkey. Leyla Önal, who tries to convey her interest in the subtleties of languages and cultures through social sciences and literature, continues to work as a researcher and translator in London.
TITLE
Book Title: Direnişin Melankolisi
Author: László Krasznahorkai
Translation: Leyla Önal
Publisher: Can Yayınları
Series: Çağdaş (Contemporary)
Genre: Novel
Page Count: 376
