![]() ![]() If this summary of the first half of the novel sounds baffling, it's a hell of a lot clearer than the book itself. The locals excitedly assemble in the spider-infested bar to await him, where they argue, drink and dance grotesquely to the accordion into the small hours. At the end of the first chapter, they learn that Irimias, a man whom they credit with extraordinary powers, and who was supposed to have died, is on the road to the estate, with his sidekick Petrina. It is inhabited by a cast of semi-crazed inadequates: desperate peasants cack-handedly trying to rip each other off while ogling each other's wives a "perpetually drunk" doctor obsessively watching his neighbours young women trying to sell themselves in a ruined mill a disabled girl ineptly attempting to kill her cat. ![]() This is the "estate", apparently some sort of failed collective, where all hope has been lost and all the buildings are falling down. The action centres on the arrival of a man who may or may not be a prophet, or the devil, or just a violent con-man, in a rotting, rain-drenched Hungarian hamlet. ![]() It is brutal, relentless and so amazingly bleak that it's often quite funny. Satantango, first published in Hungary in 1985 and now regarded as a classic, is a monster of a novel: compact, cleverly constructed, often exhilarating, and possessed of a distinctive, compelling vision – but a monster nevertheless. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |