Because they make the trip from the nearby market town on foot in the rain, it takes the two-Irimias and Petrina-a long time to get to the estate, and the intervening lull consists of Godot-like waiting for their arrival. Some of the peasants left on the estate are planning to make off with the collective’s annual earnings but abruptly drop the ruse when they learn that two characters, whom they know and whom they think of as old friends, are on their way to the estate. The novel centers on a totalitarian state’s internal spy network. As it is, Krasznahorkai's treatment comes as a masterstroke: it lifts Satantango beyond historic time. In Eastern Europe, a novel like Satantango would either have to be kept in a drawer until after '89, or else have its ideas cloaked in coded language and its setting confined to some remote, fantastic place. Maybe Krasznahorkai got away with his stinging portrait of desuetude by setting his story against a backdrop that was not explicitly Communist. Krasznahorkai plays with a tradition in which yokels tend to be boobs, and, fittingly, his narrator is an acerbic, misanthrope, the doctor. Residents are at once comically loutish, and incompetent.

The autumn rain falls incessantly, and characters smoke nonstop under drizzle and downpour, as if connected to a fire that will not be put out. They live in its rotting houses and congregate in its tumbledown, spider-infested pub. Its inhabitants include peasants, a mechanic, a headmaster, a doctor, a couple of teenage whores, their drunken mother, vicious younger brother, and demented little sister. A large part of the action takes place on or around an unnamed estate that is largely abandoned. Krasznahorkai’s depiction of loutish peasants and a work collective in ruins must have been a slap in the face of Communist censorship. Krasznahorkai published the novel four years before the fall of Communism, and, indeed, the book targets the ravages of totalitarianism in Hungary and beyond.

Presented in breathtaking English by George Szirtes, Satantango takes place in a world where Satan rules people’s actions and the meanings of their lives. The tale includes enough metaphysical speculation to let us know that we’re in one of the tonier quarters of intellectual fiction-department of existential angst. Published in Hungarian in 1985 and recently out from New Directions, Satantango opens with an epigram from The Castle and features characters on leave from Waiting for Godot.

Satantango laszlo krasznahorkai