After finishing Satantango I decided to bag another short Krasznahorkai book. I hadn't expected it to be my favourite of his works I've read.
This short volume of two stories (I can't be the only person who's had more than enough of the phrase 'slim volume', can I?) was published in English in 2016. It was longlisted for the 2017 US Best Translated Book Award. The stories are thematically similar, but separated by 23 years: 'The Last Wolf' appeared in its Hungarian original in 2009, but 'Herman' was in his first short story collection, from 1986. (Thanks to this article in Music & Literature magazine where I checked that info just now.)
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At last, a Krasznahorkai work I really connect with. Reading Sátántangó a few days ago, I realised that strength of personal connection was what would make the difference between giving his books 4 stars (as I did Sátántangó and Seiobo There Below) or 5, because I can't seem to find them as utterly singular as many of his English-language worshippers do. (I'm still not sure what they see that I don't; or if I'm arrogant - I probably sound it, because he has been placed on a pedestal as the author who is an epitome of 'difficult' and 'for those in the know', as DFW used to be c.15 years ago - or if I have simply read different things that make his themes seem more familiar, which is what it feels like.)
I loved The Last Wolf for simple thematic reasons. Because the narrator is a washed-up minor academic and writer who seems to have been offered an interesting piece of work by mistake, but he grabs it anyway, in a way I for one found wholly relatable. Because it's set in Extremadura, the only part of Spain I've ever really found fascinating. (When I did Spanish at school, I wasn't that interested in anywhere else, and I've never felt that you hear enough about Extremadura. But you wouldn't because a lot of it is a rural semi-wilderness.) And because it's fiction about the natural world and its destruction - similar to the sort that Amitav Ghosh and Richard Powers have recently exhorted readers and writers of English-language literary fiction towards, trying to mainstream ideas already established in eco-criticism. But written earlier (2009), in a different literary culture and by an author of this calibre, The Last Wolf follows its own path.
I was impressed by the narrator's being so moved, unexpectedly affected, by the demise of the last Spanish wolves - as were some other, but emphatically not all, characters. He's the sort of protagonist who, in many novels, is immersed in the insular concerns of the artist and in bad love-affairs, but here he cares about something beyond himself without its being presented as a cloying life-lesson. It was conveyed so very well that it never risked cheesiness or sentimentality (which, I am realising, Krasznahorkai, is skilled in averting). The narrator's silent annoyance with the interpreter at the height of the story - as she became so involved in the story she no longer interpreted it fully - neutered that possibility, and introduced a marvellous emotional honesty to the moment that so many other authors would have neglected or skimmed over. (A very Buddhist awareness of emotion is one of the unifying points of the 'bleak' and 'transcendent' sides of Krasznahorkai's work.) The Last Wolf is a work about form and style as much as it is about its topic, and so it could never be dismissed as either 'issue fiction' or 'style over substance'. (Setting up ideals of art is not a very good idea, and can be constraining, but I have to admit this is one of mine at the moment: not art versus politics, but both at once in the same work.)
It felt right to be reading this over Hallowe'en and the following days of the dead, and as further statistics on the extent of wildlife extinction hit the news. It would have been too heavy-handed as a deliberate choice, but I'd ended up reading it because it was mentioned in a discussion thread I'd looked at while reading Sátántangó, and I was so interested in the topic of The Last Wolf I had to look at it before I'd finished the previous book.
The complex framing - the narrator is telling much of the story of what happened in Spain to a bartender at his local in Berlin, some time (probably years) later - and the wide ranging across Europe by a depressive character reminded me at times of Sebald's Austerlitz. But the sentence, the whole story being one sentence, was of course far longer than any of Sebald's. The whole story may be one long sentence, but it does not double-back on itself (like late Henry James, or parts of Seiobo): it always moves forward, which means that it is not as complex an experience as some might assumed. Only once ever did I look back, and then only one page, to make sure of what a clause referred to. My gradual steps up in reading narrative styles over a week or so, from Anna Burns' Milkman to Sátántangó to this meant The Last Wolf didn't feel tense, as I often find works in very long sentences do. The single-sentence structure was merely a reminder that within the frame, this was a story being told all in one go; and by the end, it related the story to where the narrator was at, psychologically, at the time of telling the story. (Krasznahorkai has said that he finds short sentences artificial, whilst long ones seem to him to more accurately reflect conversation and thought.)
The frequency of German place-names in Sátántangó were a reminder that the setting was the territory of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, a larger and more mixed territory than the post-war, Communist, mostly-ethnically-Hungarian Hungary. In the firmly post-Communist Last Wolf, the narrator, free to travel as a European intellectual from an EU country, wanders former Hapsburg lands: a Hungarian on his uppers resident in Berlin, he finds himself summoned over to Spain, and then returns to Germany.
The two Herman stories were first published in 1986, a year after Sátántangó: like the novel, they have a dank rural setting, and grapple with characters' dark inner thoughts about their relationship to the world.
Part of me always reads any story about gamekeepers, poachers and their techniques through Danny the Champion of the World (by far my favourite Roald Dahl book as a kid - though no-one else's that I ever met - and one of the few books I read so often that my copy looked worn, whilst back then I could read a book twice and still leave it looking brand new). I wasn't expecting to be made to revisit it and that past self now, remembering creeping through the wood with them (how badly I wanted to do that or to be them; sometimes it was my greatest wish!), hoping bait worked, lost in the process, irrelevant in the moment which side one was on - and having to feel and see that alongside my later, more informed and harder-line opinions about the repeated introduction of an invasive species to just to kill it and generally disrupt the local ecosystem.
Herman part I, 'The Game Warden', the tale of a gamekeeper who changes sides, could have been trite in almost any other hands. I wasn't quite convinced this would be something that could have really happened then and there, or occurred to a similar real man, rather than an artist's idea - but the depth of Krasznahorkai's attention to mental processes, and especially his unsentimental relating of them at junctures where most other writers would concentrate on action or cheap crowd-pleasing emotion, elevates it to a level far above obvious poetic justice. He renders the existential and depressive and grubby into some kind of high Gothic, so that one can marvel at the way he describes it and at the baroque darkness of the atmosphere, rather than being dragged down.
Part II, 'Death of a Craft' is subtitled "contra Yukio Mishima". I haven't read any Mishima; I only know a little about him by reputation, and any parallels I draw between this story and other books here are merely free association, and have a major lacuna. A louche crowd of shaggers, army officers and women from the city, visit the small town where Herman is active (tagging along, in somewhat unlikely, but certainly decadent fashion, because one of their number is visiting her seriously ill mother, who lives in the town). I couldn't help but reflect on how contemporary kink types would (mostly) use very different, rather prosaic terminology. Here, written in Hungary in the mid 80s these people are a little exotic, tinged with the sentiments of notorious transgressive books like The Story of the Eye (although I'm sure what they were up to is actually not shocking at all by contemporary Western standards, unlike the escapades in that book). I liked the way none of their number had obvious views that might be expected from urbanites about Herman (especially enjoyed the giggling at the phrase 'noxious predators', a term frequently repeated in the earlier story), and that their view of him was related rather neutrally - although, in retrospect, it wasn't entirely convincing that none of the party would have divergent opinions about the gamekeeper-gone-wild. (And like Sátántangó and The Last Wolf, the Herman stories are full of names that are both German and Hungarian.)
This whole volume - and Herman I: 'The Game Warden', especially, makes a fantastic companion-piece to Olga Tokarczuk's recently-translated Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which I read a month ago - and which was published in its original Polish in 2009, the same year as The Last Wolf was released in Hungarian. So far as I can tell, the 1986 story collection that originally included Herman has not been translated into Polish, but it was published in German in 1988. 'The Game Warden' and Plow provide two similar critiques of hunting in cultures where it's much more accepted and normal than it is in Britain; the ultimate point of divergence between the two is to be around religion / Christianity. The sense of universal compassion which emerges near the end of 'The Game Warden', whilst couched in the language of Christianity, is syncretic and can also be taken in the context of the Buddhist values and worldviews that become explicit in Seiobo, and quite possibly other works by Krasznahorkai which I have not read or which are unavailable in English. Krasznahorkai aims for the transcendent and spiritual (Herman could be seen to have achieved a stage of enlightenment and/or to have been progressing towards it in a misguided fashion, by acting out what should have remained an inner realisation) whereas Tokarczuk's book makes a critique of the earthly Polish Catholic Church.
(Finished and reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads.)
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