Satantango

A Hungarian agricultural collective is collapsing, its land soaked by rain that never seems to let up, when word spreads through the handful of remaining villagers that Irimiás, a man they believed dead, is walking back into the settlement. László Krasznahorkai builds Satantango around what Irimiás does with that return: charismatic, manipulative, promising the villagers a better life elsewhere, he persuades them to hand over what little money they have and follow him, a con that plays out against a landscape so bleak, mud, abandoned buildings, a nonfunctioning church bell, that the swindle feels almost beside the point next to the desolation surrounding it.

The novel's structure mimics the dance named in its title, twelve chapters arranged six moving forward through the story and six moving back through it, so that the reader experiences the village's collapse and Irimiás's manipulation from more than one angle before the pieces settle into their full shape. One thread follows Estike, a neglected child who poisons herself in the surrounding woods, a death Krasznahorkai renders with the same unflinching, circling attention he gives everything else in the book. By the novel's end Irimiás has scattered the villagers he conned across the country with almost nothing to show for their trust, while the Doctor, the one man who stayed behind rather than follow him, wanders the ruined settlement and finds a solitary, deranged figure ringing the bells of an abandoned church as darkness comes down over everything.

Krasznahorkai writes in enormous, looping sentences that can run for pages without a full stop, a style that mirrors the tango structure's own circling motion and that asks real patience of a reader used to shorter units of prose. It suits a reader drawn to bleak, hypnotic fiction about collapse, whether of a farm, a community or a belief that anything better is actually coming.