Translated by Ottilie Mulzet. New York, NY: New Directions, 2019. 576 pages. $29.95.
How ready are you for the end of the world? I’m asking not about physical readiness, doomsday bunkers, and disaster preparation, but rather about your psyche. Let’s assume that everything is already happening too late. If you had to compose a funeral dirge for history, how would you sing it? In anger, in sadness, in terror? “Instead of expecting the apocalypse to come,” the cult Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai has said, “we need to understand that we are already living in it. The apocalypse has already commenced.”
Krasznahorkai’s work has always been the kind of writing that strives to show the cracks in the world, the destructive force waiting beneath ordinary surfaces. He writes in dizzyingly long sentences, which you enter like a swimmer, holding your breath, and he writes about people who are either mad or haunted or who are glimpsing, for just a moment, a reality that is too terrible to bear. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, his latest novel, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, shares the concerns of Kraszanhorkai’s earlier work, but it is also profoundly, unsettlingly off-kilter, even in terms of the dark vision of his other novels. This is a novel that has orchestral movements, often discordant ones, unmarked perspective shifts, and puzzling undertones. Major characters disappear without a trace, a Biblical plague of frogs appears from nowhere, a tabloid newspaper sends a town into mass hysteria, and Krasznahorkai’s many, many narrators mostly go on thinking about lunch meat, underwear, and the profound boredom of their day jobs even in the face of insufferable evil.
The plot, such as it is, is as such: Baron Bela Wenckheim is the last scion of a noble family that once ruled over an unnamed provincial Hungarian town. After falling into financial ruin abroad, he is returning home, hoping to see his teenage sweetheart, Marika, one last time before his death. The local tabloids, unfortunately, have missed the news that Baron Wenckheim is destitute, and prior to his arrival, a storm of rumors begins circulating that the ailing Baron intends to make over a vast fortune to restore and invigorate his birthplace. A host of con men, thugs, politicians, and various others converge upon the Baron, hoping to siphon up a little bit of his (totally imaginary) fantastic wealth.
The Baron himself is the ghost of a past world. He is so unmoored in time that early in the novel he asks whether it’s possible for his valet to send a telegram for him. He cannot order a taxi alone; he has no notion of what things cost; he is possessed by a melancholy illness that causes him to cry, perpetually. At one point in the novel, a suitcase full of his clothes goes astray, and the people who open it are astounded at the eerie, elongated proportions of his bespoke jackets and formal pants, which look as if they were made for an impossible human.
As he wanders through the town that Marika (his childhood sweetheart) likes to describe as “her enchanted city,” Baron Wenckheim slowly becomes consumed by the idea that the town he once loved has been destroyed and replaced with a reproduction. Why, he wonders, does nothing that has happened to him make sense? Why has his life been so entirely useless?
The answer is that he is a character uneasily transplanted from a more traditional novel, and the novel, with its accepted structures of plot, character, setting and conflict, is unequipped to deal with the senselessness of the world. At various points in Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, a political motorcade drives like a caesura through the novel, carrying an unnamed figure whose very presence appears to break the fabric of reality. Time, in these moments, stops. Raindrops fall upward, sound ceases to carry, people find themselves pausing in mid-sentence and then forgetting what they’ve seen and what they’ve said. Krasznahorkai does not name this politician, although readers familiar with Hungary will no doubt have theories. What is clear is that no one in the novel, neither the naïve romantics or the bitter cynics, has the capacity to confront this embodiment of political evil, as Krasznahorkai names him outright: “evil—evil, sick, omnipotent.”
In other words, this isn’t a novel in which there is a possibility of redemption. If it has a major flaw, it is that its portrayal of the daily lives and quotidian thoughts of its narrators is less compelling than these moments of intense disruption and upheaval. Krasznahorkai is at his best in describing tumult, or the dark, unswept corners of the mind. A scene with a train conductor who receives a too-large tip from Baron Wenckheim is deeply affecting, cataloguing the conductor’s mercenary angling for a tip and then his abrupt, paralyzing shame at receiving it.
When, on the other hand, Marika visits the supermarket, daydreaming about what she believes is her last chance at romance, and checks out with a package of baloney, you may laugh at the sly insinuation (as, I’ll confess, I did), but there were also places where I found the long passages of narration of these characters’ daily lives to be troubling. It feels, sometimes, like you’re being invited into a mean joke between reader and author. Aren’t these people frivolous, with their silly unrequited loves, the way their thoughts keep returning to food, to shopping, to the rivalries they have with their neighbors? The narrative voice is frequently punishingly superficial, skimming the surface thoughts from his narrator’s minds, so that, as a reader, you feel trapped in a cycle of despairing and repetitive small talk. I’ve loved Krasznahorkai’s other work not just for its apocalyptic intensity, but also for its minute and attentive moments of compassion, and I was disappointed to feel that compassion sometimes missing in Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming.
At other moments, however, the novel’s rage is convulsively persuasive. In his most polemical chapter, titled, “To the Hungarians,” Krasznahorkai follows the path of an inflammatory editorial, from writers’ room to newsstand to dinner tables around the town. Scathing and miserable, it is on its face an indictment of Hungary, but mostly a despairing account of humanity at large. So, Krasznahorkai writes:
. . . it happened that a squalid war was taking place nearby, and yet where the Hungarians were, only twenty or thirty kilometers away, life gaily went on as if nothing at all was happening on the other side of that border a mere twenty or thirty kilometers distant, they went on, right next to this misfortune, with blithe indifference. . . .
Naturally, at this point, the Chief Editor pauses his reading to applaud himself for having the bravery and strength of vision to publish such a contrarian opinion. He’s not moved by the words or ideas so much as by the fact that he’s hit on something that will be upsetting to nearly everyone—and, therefore, nearly everyone will read it. This is a world in which words and ideas no longer have meaning, if they ever did. And it’s a world that Krasznahorkai both resists and succumbs to, as the novel reaches its hallucinogenic climax, asking whether the banal misery of the novel has an end—or if the underlying order of the world is really brutality and terror, punctuated only by fleeting moments of compassion.