Description

‘Baron Wenkcheim’s Homecoming is a fitting capstone to Krasznahorkai’s tetralogy, one of the supreme achievements of contemporary literature. Now seems as good a time as any to name him among our greatest living novelists.’ Paris Review

Hailed internationally as perhaps the most important novel of the young twenty-first century, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming is the culmination of Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s remarkable and singular career.

Nearing the end of his life, Baron Bela Wenckheim decides to return to the provincial Hungarian town of his birth. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he wishes to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart Marika. What follows is an endless storm of gossip, con men and local politicians, vividly evoking the small town’s alternately drab and absurd existence. Spectacular actions are staged, death and the abyss loom, until finally doom is brought down on the unsuspecting residents of the town.

‘I’ve said a thousand times that I always wanted to write just one book. Now, with this novel, I can prove that I really wrote just one book in my life. This is the book – Satantango, Melancholy, War & War, and Baron. This is my one book.’ Laszlo Krasnahorkai

Publisher Review

Hungarian maestro Laszlo Krasznahorkai is laconic and shrewd, as practical as he is existential, capable of wresting huge laughs as well as immense profundity from the commonplace and the way in which we choose to respond to it. * Irish Times * The Hungarian maestro is on peerless form with a work of dark wit and dizzying prose -- Anthony Cummins * Observer * Mesmerisingly strange ... this blackly absurd satire of provincial Hungarian life is maddening, compelling - and very funny ... exhilaratingly out of step with most contemporary fiction * Guardian * Baron is not bedtime reading: you need your wits about you ... This is a novel that demands much of its readers, and gives much in return. In an era glutted with fiction as vapid and insubstantial as a Krispy Kreme doughnut, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming is the real Linzer torte. * The New Statesman * A mantra of fret, a strangely uplifting pessimism ... the Hungarian master has created perhaps his most accessible novel * Prospect * With an immense cast and wide-ranging erudition, this novel [is] the culmination of a Hungarian master's career * New Yorker * This vortex of a novel compares neatly with Dostoevsky and shows Krasznahorkai at the absolute summit of his decades-long project. Apocalyptic, visionary, and mad, it flies off the page and stays lodged intractably wherever it lands. * Publisher's Weekly starred review * Krasznahorkai constantly pushes beyond the expected, escalating everything to the brink of deliriousness * The New York Times Book Review * Astounding * Die Zeit * The contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse who inspires comparison with Gogol and Melville -- Susan Sontag