The third novel by László Krasznahorkai, the author of Sátántangó (Satan’s Tango), one of the most important Hungarian novels of the 1980s, was published this year, a full ten years after his second, Az ellenállás melankóliája (The Melancholy of Resistance). Publication of Háború és háború (War and War) had indeed already begun some time before; as the author says, "I was determined to send a message to my kind, lonely, weary and sensitive readers, namely that the work in progress was/ would be about them. I began to publish single sentences at a time in three carefully chosen periodicals, and in so doing I wanted to send a signal to those readers who I thought would recognize that the sentences were intended for them. I had no message for readers who were not kind, not lonely, not weary nor sensitive, and I never will have." These single sentences ultimately ran to a pamphlet-worth of material, which was published last year under the title Megjött Ézsaiás (Isaiah Has Come). The author originally wanted to deliver it to his friends in person, but in the end it came out via the usual book retailing channels, although in terms of publicity it was a very low-key event.

All this may be regarded either as a publicity stunt to arouse interest in the forthcoming book or as a ploy on the part of the author to prevent his followers from forgetting him during his long silence. Krasznahorkai himself, on the other hand, interprets these events in the same way as the events that were deliberately staged in the aftermath of the book’s publication; he uses these events to transpose his fictitious hero into the real world. "In my imagination a character came into being whose life I would like to follow through to the end, and the end as far as I am concerned is not in the world of fiction, but in reality… I don’t think a novel has to end where we always thought it did."

Let us, however, look first of all at what we are dealing with in the space that begins and ends between the covers of the book itself. Háború és háború, in long and convoluted compound sentences, tells the story of the strange adventures, the Odyssey or, if you like, the obsession of a rural archivist. Dr György Korim, who works in the public archives of a small town some two hundred and twenty kilometres south-east of Budapest, one day stumbles unexpectedly upon a mysterious typescript among the papers of the Wlassich family. The typewritten script reveals no clue as to who its author was, when or where it was written, or for what purpose. Korim reads it through at one sitting and is so spellbound by the beauty and mysteriousness of it that his life would never be the same again. He decides that "he must do something", that this document should not go back into the archives, but forward into immortality where it belongs. Breaking all ties with his family and his workplace, he sells up everything he owns and sets off like a sleepwalker for the epicentre of the world, New York, where he intends to type the text of the manuscript into a computer and put it on the world-wide web, which he considers to be a safer and sounder place, or medium, for something eternal than anything else that has ever been devised for that purpose by humankind.

From the moment of his great awakening Korim behaves like some kind of saint or prophet who has had a vision and now, in a state of exaltation, sets about fulfilling the mission he was entrusted with. Hungry and thirsty, filthy, stinking, with shaven head and jug-ears, looking like some weird kind of bat in his black overcoat, all sorts of dreadful mishaps befall him as he bumbles along amongst people he meets by chance or, more often, taking flight from his supposed persecutors. He travels up to Budapest stowing away in goods carriages, and hurriedly, surreptitiously gets himself a ticket and a visa for America. Once in New York he finds refuge as a lodger in the home of a Hungarian interpreter of dubious means who happens to stumble across his path. Korim’s compulsive, obsessive behaviour is also expressed in the way the book is written. The novel is divided into eight chapters, sub-divided into numbered sub-chapters, each comprising one sentence, usually one or two pages in length. They are composed as reported speech. The text for the most part cites what Korim says; Korim is forever starting conversations with total strangers and, due to the confidential nature of what he perceives to be his mission, he is not always consistent in the way he delivers his soliloquy tale of his discovery and his decision, the mishaps and tribulations that have befallen him, and the ideas that have occurred to him on the way. The novel opens with a scene that simultaneously serves to inform the reader of the background situation: in the process of fleeing, Korim is attacked by thugs on a railway footbridge, but they soon realize that there is no point in robbing him because he has nothing worth stealing—they are unaware that Korim has several thousand dollars sewn into his coat—and they end up listening to the interminable monologue that this madman has launched in his own defence, though they can make neither head nor tail of it.

The novel’s central chapters, those set in New York, are also composed of similar, reported monologues; sometimes Korim is speaking to his landlord, the drunken interpreter who is inclined to violence, and sometimes to the latter’s Puerto Rican lover, who of course has no idea what he is talking about, although Korim constantly peppers his discourse with words in English, haphazardly translating with the help of his dictionary. Details regarding the mysterious manuscript are woven into the text of the novel, likewise in reported speech; sometimes the narrator "quotes" what Korim taps into the laptop he has purchased in New York, at other times what he "tells" the woman who is forever busying herself about the kitchen in silence.

As regards the mysterious and beautiful manuscript itself, it is difficult to know what to say. It is not that Korim does not quote abundantly from it on Krasznahorkai’s behalf, or that he does not try to describe it, circumscribing it maniacally over and over again; it is just that ultimately what we find out about it remains pretty intangible. Of course some images, situations or motifs nevertheless emerge and indeed, sometimes they are highly evocative. It emerges quite clearly, for example, that the manuscript is about five men who appear at different times and places in history and in different roles, yet they are always the same person. They even have names: they are called Kasser, Falke, Bengazza, Toot and Mastemann—and even the constellation in which they appear repeats itself: the first four are companions and friends, good, kind men, and they always appear together, while the other one, Mastemann, is some kind of enemy, a demonic figure, and his appearance always presages something dreadful. There is a common pattern to the episodes in which they appear, with the four men arriving from somewhere— where is unclear—and in the end they depart again, likewise to an unknown destination. Three of the episodes can be taken more or less as a unit: one takes place on Crete, shortly before the natural disaster that wiped out Cretan civilisation; the second takes place in Cologne in the 1870s, at the time when one of many attempts was being made to complete the cathedral, just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, while the third is set in Northern Italy in 1493, during the election of the Doge of Venice. There are two further episodes: one is set in Roman times in Britain and the other in Gibraltar, also in 1493, but these two blend into each other, they are written superimposed on one another, so that it is impossible to tell whether they are written this way in the manuscript, or whether they simply get mixed up in Korim’s mind.

The way these historical interludes are presented clearly serves two rather contradictory purposes. First, there is an attempt to maintain the impression of the manuscript’s mysteriousness, to convey how difficult it is even to come close to describing, or circumscribing its indescribable beauty and uniqueness, and how impossible it is to capture it in all its entirety. In other words, what Korim is dealing with is a sacred text, a divine proclamation that his mere human words can never reproduce. At the same time, they are supposed to give a glimpse of the secrets contained in the manuscript; indeed, although Korim repeatedly states that he has searched in vain for the key to understanding the mystery of the manuscript, he later claims that he has managed to find it, and then goes on to tell us what it is:

...he read it over and over again, asking over and over again, okay, fine, but why, why, why?! This was his first question, but it was also the last, and it contained within it all the other questions, such as what kind of language was this that the manuscript was written in, if indeed it could be called a language, since it was evidently not directed at anyone, and why had its author deemed it unimportant to comply with even the most basic of standards expected of a work of literature, and anyway, if it is not a work of literature, then what is it, because it is not one, that is plain to see, and why is it that the author uses lots of amateurish devices, and yet all the while it never even enters his head that he should be in the least concerned about appearing amateurish.

and then, after all the questioning, we finally arrive at the realization that the unknown author had taken these four fictitious good, kind men and

...sent them out into reality, into history, in other words, into an eternity of war, and tried to set them down in times and places where there was a chance of peace, but without success, despite ever more frenzied attempts to conjure up this reality and depict it with ever more fiendish accuracy and diabolical palpability writing his own creations into it, but it is all in vain, more and more in vain, because the path only takes them from one war to another, never from war to peace, and this Wlassich character, or whoever he is, falls into ever deeper desperation in his one-man amateurish ritual, until in the end he loses his mind altogether, because there is no Way Out...

If we are to judge by this, the manuscript is ultimately about the fact that history is only "War and War", as anticipated in the title of the novel, which also echoes War and Peace, although in the course of reading the book this realization does not come as a great revelation, nor is it terribly convincing, first of all because it is a truism, and second because it manifests itself almost exclusively at the level of a verbal statement. About War, at least in the sense in which the term is used in common parlance, the historical interludes in fact say very little; they speak rather of some diabolical Evil that forever and everywhere rears its head, and from which there is no Way Out. Krasznahorkai’s attempt, via his central character, to make the manuscript appear full of "frenzied energy", "fiendish accuracy" and "demoniacal palpability" is somewhat unfortunate as well as being unsuccessful, since ultimately it is his own words he is describing in this way, so it would hardly hold much credibility even if it were true. If artistic or scientific genius is indescribable in literature, then how can a piece of fiction be presented credibly in fiction as a sacred work or a work of genius—or even as amateurish, since amateurishness can only be conveyed convincingly by professional means.

The key role played by the manuscript and the way it is described have not been satisfactorily resolved in Háború és háború, and the sections related to this in the book are difficult to read, tedious and stilted. The story of Korim’s profane apotheosis, on the other hand, which at times tends towards subtle irony, is poignantly beautiful, although rather fragmented if one separates it from the manuscript. After rescuing the manuscript and taking it to "heaven", in other words, the internet, and the saga of events that surround this mission, Korim becomes entranced by a photograph of a work of art representing an Eskimo igloo, and goes to visit the museum in Schaffhausen where the original is kept. Here we lose sight of him, but his story does not end there, since the author intended his tale to continue in real life. Just as he began to introduce his character before the novel was actually published, a few weeks after its publication a commemorative plaque was put up on the wall of the Schaffhausen museum, in the eye of the real public, bearing a message from Korim, "may you find peace in the words of a plaque", the peace that his four beloved fictitious heroes failed to find; the peace that he too, the fictitious hero of a novel whom Krasznahorkai’s "kind, lonely weary and sensitive" reader has grown fond of, failed to find.

The publication of the new book by Ádám Bodor was also preceded by great anticipation, given that it was he who produced one of the most important Hungarian literary works of the last ten years, Sinistra körzet (Sinistra District). While Krasznahorkai’s new book is ambitious, assailing the bounds of the possible, and at times rather tough going, Az érsek látogatása (The Archbishop’s Visit) is a wonderfully elegant, virtuoso, witty chamber piece. This may appear strange given that this short book, which takes no time at all to read, is set in more or less the same area as Sinistra District, somewhere in Eastern Europe, near the border between the Ukraine and Romania, an infernal region composed of real and imaginary elements creating a picture of decay, dilapidation and chaos. It is as if nature had ordained that meaninglessness and misery should be the eternal lot of those living here, and they all regard it as quite natural because of this. The special magic and morbid humour of The Archbishop’s Visit lies in the tension created by the grotesque contradiction between this Kafkaesque, nightmarish world and the dispassionate, indeed insolently joyful, flowing tone in which it is written. The first-person narrator is an eyewitness directly affected and later actively involved, an individual not really capable of seeing beyond the horizons of her world and for whom everything that happens is part of a familiar, everyday reality in which she feels quite comfortable. She seems almost to take pleasure in painstakingly piecing together, bit by bit, the mosaic of this nightmarish story. The reader meanwhile, in the face of the casually presented details, the mad turns of events, squirms in recognition at the horrors and absurdities of this Eastern European world with its mix of nationalities where, it seems, nothing ever changes.

Bogdanska Dolina is the name of the small town where the events take place. On the edge of the town there are towering heaps of rubbish whose stinking fumes envelop the town in a thick soup of fog. At one time the mountain infantry ran this territory, as we read in Sinistra District, but in the meantime there has been a change of regime and Orthodox priests have taken charge. The town’s leader, the bishop’s Vicar Periprava, has been asleep for years and to put an end to this permanent state of transition, his deputies have him butchered and cut up into small pieces. Real power in the town is exercised by these two deputies, the archimandrites. At their instructions the town has been preparing, likewise for several years, for a visit from the archbishop. In theory, the visit is supposed to take place each weekend, so each weekend everything must be ready. The railway station has been renovated and locked up, out of use, awaiting the archbishop’s train. The only people allowed through the nailed-up doors and windows are the seminary students who spend their days and nights polishing the floor with pads attached to the soles of their feet. This haunting image recurs on numerous occasions in the narrative, as do other indications of this constant state of readiness, such as the fact that there is a clothing hire business that operates out of a trailer, where the local people can hire their dress suits for the great occasion that is supposed to happen each week; or the fact that there are storerooms where all the gifts intended for the archbishop are kept, including bone carvings made by the seminary students and mounds of mouse-eaten egg-loaf with jam that people bake each week on a Friday night in anticipation of the great event. Not only does the archbishop never arrive, we find out from a casual remark interpolated by the narrator that at some point in the course of events he has been blown up in an explosion at the railway station of a nearby town.

The story centres around the hairdressing salon of Mrs Colentina Dunka, the narrator, where the brushing ladies spend their time brushing and washing the long beards of the priests and rubbing them with royal jelly, curd-cheese and mink oil. It is here that Gábriel Ventuza appears one day. On behalf of his brother, who mysteriously seems to wield considerable power despite the fact that he is in prison, Ventuza intends to have his father’s mortal remains exhumed and removed. Until he was murdered, the latter had enjoyed great fame in the locality as a smuggler of people. To get authorization for this undertaking and to carry it through, Ventuza needs money, for which purpose he has himself appointed military chaplain and, following in his father’s footsteps, at the request of rich Armenian relatives, he helps the elderly Senkowits sisters to escape via underground tunnels from the internment camp that had been set up at the edge of the town, according to the official version for the purpose of isolating consumptives. In fact, the priests are in the habit of declaring people sick and shutting them away here at will. The geography teacher, Vidra, thus finds himself in the quarantine camp; his wife Natalia Vidra is a brushing lady at the hairdressing salon, and the only contact she has with her husband takes the form of small scraps of cloth soaked in saliva that they send each other via the good offices of Gábriel Ventuza, who has access to the camp, and who ferries these highly intimate objects backwards and forwards in a medical phial concealed in his underpants. Every evening the seminary students pelt the quarantine patients with stones. Bizarre motifs such as these drift through the story like the shreds of plastic carrier bags from the garbage dump that drift through the air above the town.

But Gábriel Ventuza has rescued the Senkowits girls in vain; they have seen better days, but now they are just ugly, smelly old women, and the Armenian relative has no use for them. When they exhume the father’s remains, it turns out that they are not his. By the end of the story, the town’s bosses have completely changed; Gábriel’s brother, whom we previously encountered as a prisoner in an underground jail, unexpectedly emerges in the role of Vicar General. The post of chaplain of the camp is inherited from Gábriel by the narrator, while Gábriel himself, who originally came to Bogdanska Dolina with the intention of moving on as soon as he had done what he came to do, takes over her clothing hire business. Years pass in Ádám Bodor’s story, and appearances suggest that a great deal happens to Gábriel Ventuza and his fellow townspeople: it is as if a nicely rounded, eventful, plausible story were unfolding around them, yet everything stays exactly the same. Immutable madness and degeneration circle forever above Bogdanska Dolina.

The most important living writer to emerge from Slovakia’s Hungarian population, Lajos Grendel, this year received Hungary’s highest artistic distinction, the Kossuth Prize. Grendel belongs to a generation of Hungarian writers from outside the country’s borders who just as much, if not more, are part of Hungarian literature as their minority’s literature. Previously this minority literature had been largely closed in on itself. From 1990, however, the borders between the literature of the Hungarian minority in neighbouring countries and that of the mother country have become increasingly blurred. Grendel had been part of this more unified trend earlier on too, insofar as he was unwilling to devote himself as a writer to the particular local socio-political problems of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia, but depicted these from a greater distance and, importantly, in the post-modern spirit of literary narrative. He did so sometimes at the price of taking an ironic, critical approach to certain characteristics and contradictions of minority life that, in the light of the historical developments of the last century, are more usually treated with great gravity.

One such example is his new short novel, Tömegsír (Mass Grave), which is a satire on how provincialism tends towards absurdity. Here Grendel provocatively confronts the tragic historical past and a blinkered present that deals with this past in a clumsy and stupid manner. The present has no real connection with this past, but if it comes across traces of the past, it manipulates these according to its own petty and selfish way of thinking. The first-person narrator is a middle-aged man, a historian and lecturer at Bratislava University, who has had family property returned to him as a result of the post-communist restitution process, a piece of land in a village populated by Hungarians. Here, while digging a well, they unearth a mass grave, which causes great excitement and confusion among the locals. The village eminencies have to deal with the matter in an official capacity, but they have no idea how to handle it, whether to try to hush it up, or to capitalize on it. The bones that are being unearthed provide no clues as to the identity of the people buried there, or as to when or in what circumstances they met their death.

A pharmacist, Doctor Dömötör, a wise and widely respected native of the village, solves the problem when he thinks he remembers how once, during the war, German soldiers herded hundreds of innocent people towards the village. These had obviously been the victims. This seems fairly plausible, and since what Doctor Dömötör thinks and wants is in any event accepted unquestioningly by everybody in the village, they decide to exploit the mass grave to the village’s advantage; they have a monument erected to commemorate the victims and ask their new fellow-resident, the historian from Bratislava, to write the history of Doctor Dömötör’s tale. The latter, meanwhile, is made a freeman of the village.

Grendel’s story is written most artfully. Of course the real story is not about the mass grave, and even less about what actually happened at that time long ago in T. Indeed it skirts the issue to such an extent as to be almost blasphemous and lacking in reverence. Grendel takes cover behind his hero, the historian, who is probably no different from the self-important villagers. Although the author perplexingly conceals the story’s "bias", in other words, suppressing any criticism of his narrator and hero, the detailed account of his hero’s entanglements with women, his sexual exploits and his life in the capital in general, in which our only link to events taking place in the village is through him, may be construed as a portrait of a cynical historian and intellectual for whom history means nothing apart from teaching material and a means of earning a living. He is not interested in forming a relationship with the villagers or getting involved in the business of the mass grave, and when the latter refuse to be shaken off, pursuing him at work and harassing him at home, he tries to escape them. In the end he capitulates, however, and so completely that he even goes to live in the village, and gradually adopts their way of life and way of thinking.

This grotesque satire is at its best in the description of the village potentates. The middle third of this short novel takes the form of one, large-scale, interconnected scene: a wild party at a hunting lodge, where the mayor, the chief of police, the notary public and Doctor Dömötör are trying to win over the guest from Bratislava with a lavish orgy of eating and drinking, and a few willing girls thrown in for good measure. He is reluctant and uncooperative, and thereby offends Doctor Dömötör. This scene, written with great vigour and in virtuoso passages of dialogue, recalls on the one hand the classic portrayals of country gentlemen by writers such as Móricz or Krúdy, and on the other the masters of the Czech grotesque absurd such as Hrabal or the film-makers Forman and Menzel. The aggressive, narcissistic pharmacist is a perfect caricature of the perennial provincial figure whose confident bearing leads him to be regarded as something of an oracle in a small community, a role he is never tired of and which gives him great satisfaction.