‘Searching through a dusty book for some vanished main clause...’: Reading László Krasznahorkai’s Sátántangó

Suddenly he sat up straight in his chair as a new thought dawned on him. He raised his head and stared at the ceiling, gasping for breath, then gripped his pencil . . . 'Now he is standing up," he wrote in a deepening reverie, pressing the pencil lightly in case he tore the paper. 'He scratches his groin and stretches. He walks around the room and sits down again. He goes out for a piss and returns. Sits down. Stands up.’ He scribbled feverishly...

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"Crisis is the default state of history"

"He gazed sadly at the threatening sky, at the burned-out remnants of a locust-plagued summer, and suddenly saw on the twig of an acacia, as in a vision, the progress of spring, summer, fall and winter, as if the whole of time were a frivolous interlude in the much greater spaces of eternity, a brilliant conjuring trick to produce something apparently orderly out of chaos,to establish a vantage point from which chance might begin to look like necessity . . . and he saw himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin, painfully...

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"But of course a man can never...

...really liberate himself from anything, he leaves the prison into which he was propagated and born only at the instant of his death. We enter a world which precedes us but is not prepared for us, and we have to cope with this world, if we can't cope with this world we're done for, but if we survive, for whatever constitutional reason, then we must take care to turn this world, which was a given world but not made for us or ready for us, a world which is all set in any case, because it was made by our predecessors, to attack us and ruin us and...

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