Winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize
The Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai's magisterial, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town.
A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumours. 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.
The novel's characters are unforgettable: the evil Mrs. 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 centre of the book, the only pure and noble soul to be found.
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 Guardian, 'lifts the reader along in lunar leaps and bounds.'
- ISBN10 1781256241
- ISBN13 9781781256244
- Publish Date 12 May 2016 (first published 1 January 1999)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Profile Books Ltd
- Imprint Tuskar Rock
- Edition Main
- Format Paperback (UK Trade)
- Pages 336
- Language English