The Hungarian writer, winner of the Booker prize in 2015 and prophet of postmodernism, he meditates on the 30 years since the publication of ‘Tango satanic’
When László Krasznahorkai (Hungary, 1955) was writing his Tango satanic, already declining with fairly little education the proposals of adaptation of Béla Tarr. The director, pope of experimental film and insistent as the most, saw in the aliterado and tinning style of the writer that, mixing interchangeably the direct and indirect styles an authentic mine. “In the end, he convinced me. Or I convinced him I to him, rather. Always just making the movie that I wanted to, but with the ideas that he did not know I had,” he says. When is the 30th anniversary of the publication of the original book, the winner of the Man Booker International in 2015 and is the author of Melancholy of resistance, visited Madrid in a meeting organized by the Student Residence.
Although the novel was published in 1988, the reluctance of Krasznahorkai for his masterpiece and the complicated process for passing any film Tarr made that the film would not see the light until 1994. Quickly, the seven and a half hours of footage in black-and-white about the life of the peasants of Hungary’s deeply devoted to the tandem of authors between the cinefilia more inveterate. The writer, in conversation with THE WORLD, he clarifies with a knowing sneer, that there were more ingredients in the equation: “I do not have all the blame, we receive a lot of pressure from the communist government to not bring forward a project that is so critical. So for that Béla is not slaying him, I kept writing novels and promising that he would help take them to the cinema”.
Heir to the tradition kafkaesque central, considered as the prophet of postmodernism, explains that “the only thing” that has tried in all his books is “not to forget the TWENTIETH century. In the tradition of the modern novel seems to be that we have forgotten all the hardships and great authors such as James Joyce, Samuel Beckett or Roberto Bolaño”. Asked about if that lack of memory is extensible to the western democracies, Krasznahorkai fits, because he knows that it comes from the same country that Viktor Orban and who lived according to the plan of Moscow, a good part of his life: “it is Not so much that we have forgotten that we do not kill to totalitarianism, and that only put him to sleep. For all the people of my generation it was inconceivable that nazism would arise again, and the success of populists as Trump, or Le Pen seem to us to be heinous. Even the xenophobia dilute the small dictators of eastern Europe to shock us”. The author makes a small pause to anyone who wants to read the veiled reference: “What you need to understand is that these guys are taking advantage of the hope to turn it into fear, and, almost always, the first affected is the art”.
the role of The writer in society, yes, awakens no interest in Hungarian: “we are Not here to change things, why do large groups of people and righteous people. The writer should only be accountable to itself and that is more than enough. Must take advantage of this freedom and embrace it”. Krasznahorkai, whose masterpiece is now reissued by Cliff, do not believe in revisionism: “If I were to write the novel now, it doesn’t seem at all like the original,” he explains. Before approaching “dangerously” time to eat, she says with a smile, his explanation to “dancing in hell”, the way in which once described his writing: “to Speak of technical issues with a writer is like asking the person more beautiful in the world how you did it. They are concepts that can only be separated by abstraction. It is something you are born with”.
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