In interviews, Krasznahorkai presents himself as a yogi of aesthetic severity. “The reader must content themselves with these lone concrete, but vague, indications, quite simply because what I describe…can happen anywhere.” For after all: “Time and space aren’t very important. Only the situation counts.”3 This aesthetic of restriction has its modernist history—in the novels of Franz Kafka or Samuel Beckett—but I think that Krasznahorkai’s fiction is in fact more mischievous than his statements might imply. It isn’t simply that he leaves information out; he also presents the information he does offer in a systematically oblique way. Satantango is structured in two parts, two halves of six chapters each, which form a quilt of both time frames and perspectives, moving from character to character, all arranged around this particular evening at the local bar and the following couple of days. The second chapter of Satantango, for instance, begins a little further back in time than the first. This isn’t, however, made clear until toward the chapter’s end. It is also written from the perspective of new characters: two men who sit waiting in the corridor of what appears to be a government office. After four pages, the reader discovers that one of them is Petrina; after another five, that the other is Irimiás—the two men whose arrival at the collective farm so excites Futaki and Mr. and Mrs. Schmidt.
more from Adam Thirlwell at the NYRB here.