Description

By (author) Krasznahorkai Laszlo; Contributions by Mulzet Ottilie

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WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2019: The defining master-work of the Man Booker International winner”s spectacular career, now in paperback

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FROM THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 2025Hailed internationally as perhaps the most important novel of the young twenty-first century, Baron Wenckheim”s Homecoming is the culmination of László Krasznahorkai”s remarkable and singular career.Nearing the end of his life, Baron Bela Wenckheim decides to return to the provincial Hungarian town of his birth. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he wishes to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart Marika. What follows is an endless storm of gossip, con men and local politicians, vividly evoking the small town”s alternately drab and absurd existence. Spectacular actions are staged, death and the abyss loom, until finally doom is brought down on the unsuspecting residents of the town.”I”ve said a thousand times that I always wanted to write just one book. Now, with this novel, I can prove that I really wrote just one book in my life. This is the book – Satantango, Melancholy, War & War, and Baron. This is my one book.” László Krasnahorkai”Baron Wenkcheim”s Homecoming is a fitting capstone to Krasznahorkai”s tetralogy, one of the supreme achievements of contemporary literature. Now seems as good a time as any to name him among our greatest living novelists.” Paris ReviewTranslated by Ottilie Mulzet

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Hungarian maestro László Krasznahorkai is laconic and shrewd, as practical as he is existential, capable of wresting huge laughs as well as immense profundity from the commonplace and the way in which we choose to respond to it.

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The Hungarian maestro is on peerless form with a work of dark wit and dizzying prose

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Mesmerisingly strange … this blackly absurd satire of provincial Hungarian life is maddening, compelling – and very funny … exhilaratingly out of step with most contemporary fiction

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Baron is not bedtime reading: you need your wits about you … This is a novel that demands much of its readers, and gives much in return. In an era glutted with fiction as vapid and insubstantial as a Krispy Kreme doughnut, Baron Wenckheim”s Homecoming is the real Linzer torte.

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A mantra of fret, a strangely uplifting pessimism … the Hungarian master has created perhaps his most accessible novel

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With an immense cast and wide-ranging erudition, this novel [is] the culmination of a Hungarian master”s career

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This vortex of a novel compares neatly with Dostoevsky and shows Krasznahorkai at the absolute summit of his decades-long project. Apocalyptic, visionary, and mad, it flies off the page and stays lodged intractably wherever it lands.

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Krasznahorkai constantly pushes beyond the expected, escalating everything to the brink of deliriousness

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Astounding

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The contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse who inspires comparison with Gogol and Melville

Biographical note:
László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954. He has written 14 novels and won multiple awards including the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2025, the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2019 for Baron Wenckheim”s Homecoming, the 2015 Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement and the 2024 Prix Formentor. Several of his most famous novels, including Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance, were turned into films by the director Béla Tarr. His books have been translated into forty-two languages, and his most recent,