What is the peculiar fusion of apocalyptic pessimism and bizarre humour that defines it? László Krasznahorkai and David Szalay’s novels might have the answers.
Writers László Krasznahorkai (left) and David Szalay.
On Sunday, December 7, the 2025 Nobel laureate in literature László Krasznahorkai made a rare public appearance to deliver the Nobel Week lecture in Stockholm. Crafted in prose and full of dreams about angels and rebellions, the speech had the same poignant, enigmatic poetry that shapes his novels. As opposed to “the angels of old,” the new angels…
What is the peculiar fusion of apocalyptic pessimism and bizarre humour that defines it? László Krasznahorkai and David Szalay’s novels might have the answers.
Writers László Krasznahorkai (left) and David Szalay.
On Sunday, December 7, the 2025 Nobel laureate in literature László Krasznahorkai made a rare public appearance to deliver the Nobel Week lecture in Stockholm. Crafted in prose and full of dreams about angels and rebellions, the speech had the same poignant, enigmatic poetry that shapes his novels. As opposed to “the angels of old,” the new angels, Krasznahorkai said, “have no wings, but they also have no message, none whatsoever. They are merely here among us in their simple street clothes, unrecognizable if they so wish.” He went on to speak about an old vagrant who was being chased by the police in a Berlin train station for urinating on the tracks – with much difficulty as his ageing bladder had to be coaxed and cajoled to do its job.
Was that vagrants an angel? Who are these angels and what are their vacant stares like? “They just stand there and look at us, they are searching for our gaze, and in this search there is a plea for us, to look into their eyes, so that we ourselves can transmit a message to them, only that unfortunately, we have no message to give,” Krasznahorkai went on to say – because we are all angels without wings and messages, while war rages all around us. War on humanity, nature and society, not only wars of weaponry and technology, but of language and thought.
“Krasznahorkai’s work can be seen as part of a Central European tradition,” the Nobel Prize Committee pointed out. ”Important features are pessimism and apocalypse, but also humour and unpredictability.”
The hyper-real and the surreal
What is this Central European tradition? What is this peculiar fusion of apocalyptic pessimism and bizarre humour that defines it? What is this hybrid that unites angels, human dignity and urinating vagrants in a single strain of imagination? 2025 was a strangely serendipitous year for me to think and feel my way through this question. The year of two major literary awards for Hungary – the Nobel Prize in Literature for Krasznahorkai and the Booker Prize for Hungarian-English writer David Szalay’s novel Flesh – was also the first year I went to Hungary myself, and spent three months on a writing fellowship at an institute that has been in the eye of a political storm. Over these three months, lectures and book discussions took me to several countries that have been variously defined as Central European – Austria, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, along with the more authentically East European Romania and the characteristically West European France.
I felt – and this could very well be personal – that the only country that can truly be described as Central European is Hungary. Just over a couple of hours by train from Vienna, the gateway too Western Europe, Budapest, with its scattering of Turkish thermal baths and eclectic blend of art nouveau, gothic, baroque, and communist architecture, is far less of a Western city than its Austrian neighbour. Budapest remains outside of Western Europe not only geographically but also historically and culturally. But while it is touched by some of the major historical narratives of Eastern Europe, Budapest stays on their fringes too, as does Hungary on the whole. Lacerated by both Nazism and Communism, submitting to Hitler and “saved” by the Soviets, Hungary defines that space that is both misunderstood and hybridised – Central European.
And what about that maddening and chilling blend of the absurd and the apocalyptic? A few things stood out to me at the House of Terror. Number 60 on Andrássy Avenue, Budapest’s answer to the Parisian Champs-Élysées. The most notorious house of interrogation and incarceration in Hungary stands in its widest and most opulent avenue, lined with Marciano, Oysho, Lush, Falconeri, Lindt and Sprüngli and countless others, all you can name and imagine. Interchangeable in history from Nazi to Stalinist terror, 60 Andrássy now stands as a museum loud with the messaging of the near-totalitarian illiberal democracy led by the far-right Viktor Orbán, known worldwide as “Trump before Trump”. What terror did the house see through the nightmare of the Nazi and Stalinist decades? The dark basement prison of the building holds the words of Vendel Endrédy, the Cistercian Abbot of Zirc, held for six years in solitary confinement: “When they led me to the basement of 60 Andrássy út to my first major interrogation, I prayed for the Lord to erase from my memory the names of my friends.”
The basement prison holds the remains of the standing cell, and the foxhole. The standing cell only had enough space to stand and was fitted with a glaring light bulb at eye level. In the wet cell, the prisoners were forced to remain standing in ice-cold water. The foxhole stayed in permanent darkness, under a ceiling so low that it was impossible to stand upright. The guards could turn off the ventilators at any time to leave the prisoners gasping for air. The guards were assigned the motto: “Don’t just guard them, hate them too.” Standing in the murky basement, I recalled South Africa’s Robben Island Prison, where Nelson Mandela had spent decades of his life – that cell felt spacious in comparison, with sunlight over the Atlantic streaming through the window.
60 Andrássy is the house whose political colour changed sharply between regimes but where the terror remained constant, embodying to perfection the unique politics of the Hungarian core of Central Europe – from Nazism to Communism to the post-Communist, ethnocentric totalitarianism of today. In one of its upper floors, 60 Andrássy houses a room of “changing uniforms” where figures are shown casting the uniform of one terror regime to another, and another where Nazi and Soviet horrors are screened on opposite sides of the wall. “In a telling sign of the affinity between Nazism and Communism,” the changing room records, “the Communists welcomed into their ranks those in the Arrow Cross rank and file who showed a willingness to cooperate.” And it worked beautifully. “They continued to serve, doing the same job as before: terrorising, humiliating, torturing and killing.” The theories changed while the practice remained the same. “They simply exchanged racist theory for the theory of Marxist class struggle; it was a simple matter of changing uniforms.”
Such is an infinitesimal glimpse of the convergence of the apocalyptic and the absurd, the hyper-real and the surreal that has marked Central Europe, and most pointedly, Hungary. When suffering goes beyond a point, it becomes ludicrous and evokes morbid laughter. We know this from the Fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear and Kafka’s giant beetle in The Metamorphosis. The most memorable divine fool in Krasznahorkai’s universe that I found is Valuska in his novel, The Melancholy of Resistance, mysteriously dark and strangely luminous at the same time.
While in Budapest, even before I had started reading Krasznahorkai, I stumbled upon the magnetic film, Werckmeister Harmonies, by the great Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, who passed away on January 6. At that time, I had no idea that the film was based on The Melancholy of Resistance and used a screenplay written by the novelist himself. But what returns to haunt me in that film is the moment when Valuska, a working class simpleton and the perfect dream-angel of Krasznahorkai’s Nobel speech, stares at the stilled eyes of the dead, faintly rotting, stuffed whale, the star attraction of the mysterious circus that has come touring in that unnamed Hungarian town, eventually to be thrown into political turmoil by the circus. Valuska is indeed the angel in ordinary street clothes, with an ethereal wisdom in his eyes.
Humour, both ethereal and depressing, pervades the lambent music of Tarr’s film as well as Krasznahorkai’s novel. The opening of the film builds on a scene that occurs later in the novel. A seedy bar, the Peafeffer, populated by elderly, possibly working-class men, is about to close for the night and the man running it, Mr Hagelmayer, calls out to people to leave – evoking the urgent words of the bartender in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, “Hurry up please it’s time” – a dark reminder of human mortality, of time’s “winged chariot” rushing by. Before the drunken patrons roll out on the streets, one of them calls Valuska for a last performance. Valuska chooses three men, gives them the roles of the sun, the earth, and the moon, and teaches them to rotate and revolve around their respective orbits. Earth revolves around the sun and the moon around the revolving Earth, with the sun still at the centre. As others too, start going in circles in the room, it becomes a gorgeous scene of absurdity that is as surreal as it is human – a group of elderly men in a seedy bar, heavy with alcohol – dismissively called “tubs of beer” by Mr Hagelmayer, moving in concentric circles of a disorderly order, intoxicated but orchestrated.
A magnetic human angel
Such is how humour and apocalypse come together in Krasznahorkai’s work in a uniquely central European way that I feel is best realised in the absurdist landscape that has shaped modern and contemporary Hungary. The magnetic human angel, Valuska, returns for me in the life and form of another character who came my way soon after I returned from Hungary this year – István in David Szalay’s Flesh, which a newspaper asked me to review once it made it to the Booker Prize longlist of 2025.
The novel’s bravest attempt at universality is that it is about the life of an ordinary man, one not distinguished in any way, but rather by failure by most standards of bourgeois success. It is neither striking nor adventurous, though towards the end, marked by a series of events, some outside István’s control, which render his life tragic. This is not the classical tragedy of the exceptional protagonist but the modern, existential tragedy of the ordinary citizen – not Aeschylus but Kafka. A curious ellipsis also frames the part of his life that could have been adventurous – István’s military service in Kuwait – which has gifted him post-traumatic stress disorder and some attention from people curious about war. Ellipsis is not only a larger narrative strategy but it also frames the moment and the syntax. “István sits on a leather sofa, using an empty Red Bull can as an ashtray.” Neither here nor anywhere in the vicinity are the words “smoking” or “cigarette” used, but they aren’t necessary for a novelist like Szalay.
What makes this disembodied novel so deeply sensory? It is, quite literally, flesh. Erotically evoked sexual situations and acts string together István’s life, often with the woman in a position of power over him – from the 42-year-old woman who initiates the 15-year-old into sex to the billionaire’s wife who starts an affair with him while he works as her chauffeur. The latter blooms into a genuine relationship, which gives him a life that is snatched from him with the cruelty that matches the serendipity with which it arrived. Back from this long and brilliant dream, our protagonist returns to where he started, reduced by tragedy to “the poor, bare, forked animal”, as in the searing words of King Lear on the raging heath. The absurdity of life, its gigantic pretensions, its whimpering end.
In Krasznahorkai’s imagination, the new angels “just stand there before us, looking at us, and we too just stand there looking at them, and if they understand anything from this whole thing, we certainly do not understand what is going on, the mute to the deaf, the deaf to the mute, how could there be any conversation from this, how could there be any understanding, not even to speak of the divine presence, when suddenly it will occur to every lonely, weary, sorrowful and sensitive person, as is happening right now.” Who knows, it is perhaps the sharply identity-driven politics of totalitarian central Europe that pushes Hungarian writers like Krasznahorkai and Szalay, as well as a filmmaker such as Tarr, to imagine a world where anonymity, uncertainty and vagrancy become political resistance. The vagrant described in Krasznahorkai’s Nobel Week speech took a long time finishing his defiling act as his ageing bladder would not cooperate, and in the end, he had to leave his job unfinished to run from the policeman pursuing him. This sad act of defiling is our existential rebellion in an increasingly terrifying world.
Saikat Majumdar is the author of five novels, most recently, The Remains of the Body (2024). He was a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Budapest in 2025.
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