László Krasznahorkai, who won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature today, is not the easiest writer to read. His sentences can go on for hundreds of pages; his plots don’t resolve, they dissolve; and his persistent mood is existential dread. But the Hungarian novelist’s central theme is easily parsed and sadly evergreen. Krasznahorkai writes about the stultifying effects of political oppression, but he also writes in defiance of people’s readiness to accept them. As a result, his work is equal parts depressing and invigorating. His landscapes are muddy and void, prone to sudden invasion by disturbing strangers, including the giant whale carcass that arrives on a train at the beginning of his 1989 novel, The Melancholy of Resistance. His never-ending sentences reflect the alienation of his characters, but they can also shake readers out of their torpor by propelling them forever forward, phrase into phrase, image into image.
In past decades, the Nobel Prize committee has tended to prefer lucidity and clarity, in poetry as well as prose, over experimentation. Though Krasznahorkai’s selection seems to bend this norm, it fits snugly into the committee’s larger mission. The Swedish institution often anoints writers who metabolize their specific histories into memorable language that stretches beyond borders and governments, transcending regional particulars. A laureate’s work can often feel strangely placeless and timeless—think of Louise Glück or Czesław Miłosz—and affect us all the more deeply for its eschewal of concrete, historical fact. Seamus Heaney’s sonnets about Northern Ireland in the 1970s and Annie Ernaux’s memoirs of France in the 1960s propose indirect but approachable ways of engaging with personal and national history.
Krasznahorkai was born in Hungary in 1954, two years before the Soviets viciously crushed an uprising in Budapest, and his first two novels are soaked through with an atmosphere of political terror. These novels were published before the revolutions of 1989, which would topple communism in the country. The rest of the author’s work appeared afterward, although the first English translation wasn’t published until 1998. Krasznahorkai eventually found a global cult audience, who recognized his distinct ability to cloak anomie, violence, and resignation, smudged with a kind of gutter comedy, within a labyrinthine syntax.
The historical setting of his novels might put off readers were it not for the peculiar magic of this style (to the immense credit of his skilled translators). These absorbing sentences, whose endless commas are a copy editor’s nightmare, would seem to defy adaptation into film. And yet, like many others, I first encountered Krasznahorkai not through his prose but through the films of another Hungarian, Béla Tarr. These movies—including the seven-hour-long Sátántangó, a centerpiece of which is a shambling dance in a barroom—often swap the meandering sentence for a single camera shot that lasts 10 minutes or more. The desolate roads and the mud puddles, the mangy dogs running down hills, the faces that have lost their color and their inclination for life altogether: These are the images from Tarr and Krasznahorkai that have stuck with me, along with characters whose eyes attest to “a combination of indifference and helpless resignation.”
I’ve lifted that phrase from the opening pages of The Melancholy of Resistance, Krasznahorkai’s greatest novel and the one you should start with. This book opens with a train that doesn’t arrive; then it spirals out into an anatomy of social life under conditions of extreme dysfunction:
All normal expectations went by the board and one’s daily habits were disrupted by a sense of ever-spreading all-consuming chaos which rendered the future unpredictable, the past unrecallable and ordinary life so haphazard that people simply assumed that whatever could be imagined might come to pass, that if there were only one door in a building it would no longer open, that wheat would grow head downwards into the earth not out of it, and that, since one could only note the symptoms of disintegration, the reasons for it remaining unfathomable and inconceivable, there was nothing anyone could do excerpt to get a tenacious grip on anything that was tangible …
Nothing in this paragraph reads as an explicit reference to politics in 1980s Hungary. It might as well be set in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary in 2025—or, for that matter, the United States under Donald Trump. The lightly surreal metaphors (downward growing wheat, a building with doors that don’t open) are, in a state of political chaos, not surrealism at all, but something we might accurately describe as realism. In other words, much stranger things have happened, and they happen still, and before long, we might begin to take anything that happens as inevitable, and then as acceptable. What is a mutant stalk of wheat beside the warped facts of history, the once-unthinkable things that came to pass?
In a 2025 interview with The Yale Review, Krasznahorkai spoke about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He was appalled: “A dirty, rotten war is unfolding before my eyes. The world is starting to get used to it. I cannot get used to it. I am incapable of accepting that people are killing people.” Krasznahorkai’s work throws an obstacle in front of our habituation to violence and war by showing us that what should be surreal or impossible has, in fact, become our reality. In its choice to honor his prophetic body of work, the Nobel committee has broadcast a reminder that the political relevance of art lies, paradoxically, in its sense of feeling apart from time. “The apocalypse is a process that has been going on for a very long time and will continue for a very long time,” Krasznahorkai said during the Yale Review interview. “The apocalypse is now. The apocalypse is an ongoing judgment.”
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