From apocalyptic Hungarian villages to meditations on beauty, these 10 works by 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature winner László Krasznahorkai trace his lifelong search for order amid chaos, in long-winding sentences
Few writers test the limits of language like László Krasznahorkai, the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, known for writing seemingly infinite sentences that stretch like eternity itself. Born in 1954 in Hungary, he writes of ruins — spiritual, moral, and historical — but never with despair. His novels, long and unhurried, are explorations of thought in motion: how the mind circles beauty, how faith erodes, and how chaos becomes the order of the day.
Often called “the contemporary master of apocalypse,” Krasznahorkai isn’t interested in endings so much as the endurance that follows them. His world is dense, musical, and profoundly humane. To read him is to slow down and listen to the rhythm of rain, the trail of thought, the pulse of an exhausted planet still dreaming of meaning. The Federal curates ten of his essential works that reveal the full architecture of his vision:
1. Sátántangó (1985): Krasznahorkai’s debut novel, winner of the 2015 International Booker Prize and perhaps one of his best-known works, is a bleak, brilliant portrait of a Hungarian village’s descent into moral decay. The villagers, drunk on hopelessness, wait for a man named Irimiás who promises salvation. However, all they get are manipulation and ruin. Written in 12 interconnected chapters that move forward and backward like the steps of a tango, Sátántangó traps the reader in its rhythm, its long-winding sentences.
The prose is astonishingly visual; you can almost smell the damp earth. Beyond its grim surface, the novel becomes a philosophical study of delusion: how communities invent meaning when none exists. It’s also a parable about power, belief, and betrayal. Béla Tarr’s seven-hour film adaptation, one of the greatest movie experiences, gave the novel its cult status; it remains one of the most demanding and rewarding works in modern literature.
2. The Melancholy of Resistance (1989): Set in a run-down, desolate Hungarian provincial town, with an apocalyptic air about it, the novel takes place over a couple of days. The arrival of a mysterious travelling circus, with a giant stuffed whale and a sinister purpose, sets off a chain reaction in the town, exposing its latent violence. This is Krasznahorkai’s grand allegory of political hysteria: how societies collapse under the weight of their own emptiness. Written in swirling paragraphs of breathless prose, the novel builds dread like a symphony.
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The Melancholy of Resistance is often seen as a metaphor for totalitarianism, but it’s also eerily prophetic of the populist chaos of the 21st century. Through his grotesque humour and relentless style, Krasznahorkai creates a fable of resistance. Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies (2000; the English translation of the novel came out in 1998) translated its terrifying world onto the screen. It was after reading this novel that Susan Sontag labelled Krasznahorkai as contemporary literature’s ‘master of the apocalypse.’ Ominous and surreal, this ‘feverish horror fantasy’ of a novel stays with you, just as Sátántangó does.
3. War and War (1999): Arguably his most metaphysical novel, War and War follows György Korin, a Hungarian archivist who believes he’s discovered a manuscript revealing the secret pattern of human history. He travels to New York to upload it to the Internet before taking his own life. The premise sounds simple, but the book is a meditation on time, madness, and salvation. Krasznahorkai’s prose blurs between the biblical and the banal. The novel’s structure mirrors Korin’s mind: recursive, feverish, never resting. It’s also one of the first literary works to think deeply about digital eternity, about preservation as a form of despair. In its last pages, Krasznahorkai achieves something close to grace.
4. Seiobo There Below (2008): Structured around the Fibonacci sequence (a series of numbers where each number is the sum of the two preceding ones), Seiobo There Below contains seventeen chapters (beginning with 1 and ending with 2584) about art, beauty, and devotion: a Noh actor rehearsing perfection, a restorer in Venice cleaning a masterpiece, a heron standing motionless by a river. Each story circles the moment of revelation, when human effort touches the divine, if only for a second.
It’s a deeply spiritual book, informed by the author’s years in Japan and China, where he studied Eastern philosophies. The prose is slower, more luminous, but still unbroken; like a single breath held across time. Seiobo There Below won the Best Translated Book Award in 2014 and remains his most accessible entry point for new readers. It’s a book about art as prayer, and the terrifying beauty of what can never be fully understood.
5. Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens (2004): This nonfiction work follows Krasznahorkai on a journey through China as he searches for traces of ancient culture in a modern, industrialised world. What he finds instead is loss: temples turned into tourist sites, language stripped of meaning, spirituality consumed by commerce.
The book combines travelogue, essay, and philosophical meditation. Krasznahorkai’s eye is precise and mournful; he observes with both reverence and despair. Through his translator Ottilie Mulzet, the sentences retain their rolling, hypnotic cadence.
It’s less a book about China than about the erosion of the sacred everywhere. The melancholy here is universal: the sorrow of a civilization that has forgotten how to look. Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens reads like the diary of a pilgrim who still believes beauty can save us, even as he watches it disappear.
6. The World Goes On (2013): Winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Translated Literature, The World Goes On gathers 21 short stories, parables, and philosophical sketches written in his signature long form. The title says it all: the world goes on, indifferent to human meaning. But these stories are not nihilistic; they are full of wonder at endurance itself. Whether he’s describing a man watching a flood, a traveller on a bus to nowhere, or a writer trapped in language, Krasznahorkai writes with tenderness for the mind that keeps trying.
The stories connect like fragments of one immense consciousness, circling the same questions from new angles. The World Goes On is perhaps his most distilled work: a meditation on persistence, absurdity, and the strange grace of continuing to think.
7. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (2016): This is Krasznahorkai’s grand return to the Hungarian small town of Sátántangó. An aging baron comes home after decades abroad, hoping to find love and redemption. The town, however, misunderstands his arrival as the beginning of a miraculous renewal. What unfolds is a tragicomic apocalypse; bureaucracy, vanity, and hysteria spiral toward collapse. The novel sprawls across hundreds of voices but flows as one continuous thought.
Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming is a summation of Krasznahorkai’s obsessions: salvation, decay, and the impossibility of home. It won the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature, a recognition that paved his road to the Nobel. Beneath the irony lies compassion. Krasznahorkai looks at human folly and still finds music in it that begins just as everything falls apart.
8. A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East (2018): Set in a Japanese monastery, it follows a monk searching for a lost temple—a metaphor for spiritual and artistic pursuit. The prose is slowed to a heartbeat. Krasznahorkai’s fascination with Eastern philosophy and silence reaches its purest form here. The novel suggests that the act of searching, not finding, is the essence of meaning. Sparse, haunting, and profoundly serene, it reads like an elegy for all his previous books.
9. Herscht 07769 (2021): Herscht 07769 takes place in East Germany and follows a writer investigating a local legend about a man who may have achieved transcendence through madness. A detective story and a metaphysical tale, it marks a return to the tension between decay and enlightenment that defines all of Krasznahorkai’s work. The narrative loops across time, memory, and dream, echoing Sátántangó but filtered through a postmodern consciousness. Krasznahorkai continues to expand his territory. In a way, this novel encapsulates the Nobel committee’s reasoning: that Krasznahorkai’s lifelong exploration of the end — of stories, of worlds, of certainty — has become, paradoxically, literature’s most enduring form of hope.
10. Spadework for a Palace (2022): One of his shorter recent works, Spadework for a Palace is narrated by a librarian in New York who becomes obsessed with finding the “centre of the city.” His pursuit grows manic, leading him into madness and revelation. Written in one long paragraph, the book feels like a cousin to German master Thomas Bernhard: claustrophobic, furious, and funny. As always, Krasznahorkai transforms monologue into metaphysics. The late-career masterpiece is also a sly commentary on urban alienation and the limits of modern rationality. At barely a hundred pages, it reads like an existential sprint through the maze of civilisation.
