Mailing List


Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Articles Available Online


There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954, and has written five novels and several collections of essays and short stories Until recently, at least in the English-speaking world, he was probably best known through the oeuvre of the film director Béla Tarr, with whom he has collaborated on several films over three decades, including the adaptation of several of his own novels   In 2000, the Hungarian-born British poet George Szirtes – who conducted this interview in 2012 by email – translated Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance, the first of his books to appear in English It was blurbed by Susan Sontag (‘the contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse’) and W G Sebald (‘The universality of Krasznahorkai’s vision rivals that of Gogol’s Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing’) Krasznahorkai, who was awarded the 2015 Man Booker International Prize last Tuesday, is widely recognised as one of the very best and important novelists of our time   So much so that on the occasion of the release of Sátántango, another Szirtes translation, in 2012, the author was mobbed by hipsters at Housing Works Bookstore in New York City, where the critic James Wood was interviewing him ‘[T]he excitement of Krasznahorkai’s writing is that he has come up with his own original forms…’ writes the novelist Adam Thirlwell in the New York Review of Books ‘There’s nothing else like it in contemporary literature’   James Wood, writing in the New Yorker in 2012, placed Krasznahorkai alongside post-war greats such as Thomas Bernhard, Claude Simon and David Foster Wallace Wood did qualify his comparison though – in spite of a common affinity for ‘very long, breathing, unstopped sentences’, Krasznahorkai is ‘perhaps the strangest’, his writing ‘peculiar strange and beautiful’   George Szirtes, who has now translated three of his books into English, calls Krasznahorkai’s work a ‘slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type’ His sentences, he writes, take you down ‘loops and dark alleyways – like wandering in and out of cellars’   In 2013 New Directions published László Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below (translated by Ottilie Mulzet), the latest of

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

READ NEXT

Interview

May 2011

Interview with Desmond Hogan

Ben Eastham

Jacques Testard

Interview

May 2011

Desmond Hogan is probably the most famous Irish writer you’ve never heard of. In the early 1980s, with numerous...

poetry

September 2016

Two Poems

Sun Yung Shin

poetry

September 2016

  Autoclonography   for performance   In 1998, scientists in South Korea claimed to have successfully cloned a human...

Interview

November 2012

Interview with Simon Critchley

John Douglas Millar

Interview

November 2012

Over the last twenty years Simon Critchley has produced a series of elegant works of political and cultural theory....

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required