Written 7-1-2022
I first heard the word Satantango in reference to Bela Tarr’s 1994 film which boasted a behemoth 7 hour length. Bela Tarr being the director of a couple shorter movies that I enjoyed, I searched up the movie to see what would possess him or viewers to agree to such a long movie, especially considering Tarr’s long painful shots and monochrome palette. Googling it I found that the film was an adaptation of a Hungarian novel (the same nationality as Tarr) which was only ~280 pages, which I guess made sense given Tarr’s long windedness. Though I wasn’t convinced to read said book, the concepts and mystique around both works followed me, always with an alien or unknowable quality that made me feel that somehow what was in the book was somehow totally separate from what I’d read in the past.
Fast forward about two years and on a whim I placed Satantango on a Christmas list as something I would at least eventually read. Lo and behold, I received it as a gift and, about five month later, I’ve decided to read it.
Although I initially decided to read it as a quicker read alongside some other books, the book is anything but approachable. The majority of the styling is done like a Beckett novel where there are little to no paragraph delineations, with dialogue bunched up together leaving the reader to figure out who said what, when, and why. There is an abstract language built into the grammar and formatting of the book that gives it an austere but personal additional channel from author to reader. Segments of the story are sometimes told in order, sometimes out, and sometimes not at all. The cast of characters are medium sized, but still require some juggling as none of them are really introduced in a formal way. You get a feeling that Krasznahorkai wrote everything a first time without consideration for the reader and went back to ensure that everything was cogent, while still keeping with chapters that open right into the daily routines of unknown actors with obscure and complicated inner lives.