Satantango by László Krasznahorkai

One morning near the end of October, just before the long autumn rains begin, a lame man named Futaki wakes to the sound of bells. The nearest chapel is kilometers away, it has no bell, and its tower fell down in the war. He limps to the kitchen window and looks out at a few crumbling houses on the Hungarian plain. Then the rain starts, and for the rest of the book it hardly stops.

So opens Satantango, the first novel of the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, published in Budapest in 1985. The setting is an abandoned collective farm where a handful of people have stayed behind. They scheme against each other, eye each other's wives, and dream of getting out with a little money. A doctor who is rarely sober sits at his window and keeps notes on all of them. Then news arrives. Irimiás and his sidekick Petrina, two men everyone believed dead, have been seen on the road to the estate. The residents gather in the bar, among the spiders, and drink and dance to an accordion while they wait. Is the man they are waiting for a savior or a swindler? The book lets them, and us, hope for a good while.

The way it is written is as memorable as the story. There are twelve chapters, numbered from one to six and then from six back to one, like the steps of a tango, forward and back. Each chapter is one unbroken paragraph, and the sentences can run on for many lines. That sounds forbidding, yet the book moves quickly, and it has a dark humor. Theo Tait, reviewing it in the Guardian, called it "so amazingly bleak that it's often quite funny."

Satantango was written in the last years of communist Hungary, and it can be read as a portrait of a system quietly rotting. But it has outlived that moment. Its real subject is people who wait for rescue, and the kind of man who turns up to offer it. The motto at the front of the book, borrowed from Kafka, warns that one can miss the very thing one is waiting for.

On October 9, 2025, the Swedish Academy gave Krasznahorkai the Nobel Prize in Literature for a body of work that, amid apocalyptic terror, "reaffirms the power of art." The Academy describes Satantango as a sensation in Hungary and the author's breakthrough. English readers had to wait until 2012 for George Szirtes's translation, which won the Best Translated Book Award the following year. Many knew the story earlier from the famously long 1994 film that Béla Tarr made together with the author. Persian readers can find it as «تانگوی شیطان» in three translations: by Sepand Saedi (Negah), Zahra Vosoughi (Honar-e Parineh) and Peyman Nemati (Hekmat-e Sabz).

This year's laureate will be announced on Thursday, October 8. A rainy week with last year's is a good way to wait.

Three reviews, three angles

The Guardian, Theo Tait, 2012
Tait reads the novel as black comedy. For him the book is so dark that it often turns funny, and for all its unbroken paragraphs and long sentences it moves quickly. His review is the place to start for a reader who fears the book will be heavy going.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/09/satantango-laszlo-krasznahorkai-review

The Complete Review, M. A. Orthofer
Orthofer looks at how the book is built. The chapters are numbered one to six and then back from six to one, like the steps of a tango, which he calls a round with no escape that leads back to the start. He gives the novel a B+.
https://complete-review.com/reviews/krasznahl/satantango.htm

The Millions, Adam Z. Levy, 2012
Under the title "Dance in Purgatory", Levy reads the book as a closed loop of waiting. The villagers expect deliverance from a man who may be a false prophet, and the form of the novel, six steps forward and six back, repeats the hopelessness of that waiting.
https://themillions.com/2012/03/dance-in-purgatory-laszlo-krasznahorkais-satantango.html

Original title: Sátántangó
Author: László Krasznahorkai (born 1954, Gyula, Hungary)
First publication: Magvető, Budapest, 1985
English translation: Satantango, translated by George Szirtes, New Directions, New York, 2012
Persian translations: «تانگوی شیطان», by Sepand Saedi (Negah), Zahra Vosoughi (Honar-e Parineh, 1397) and Peyman Nemati (Hekmat-e Sabz, 1404, e-book)
Genre: Novel
Film: Sátántangó, directed by Béla Tarr, 1994
Nobel Prize in Literature: 2025

Where to get it
Persian https://negahpub.com/product/%d8%aa%d8%a7%d9%86%da%af%d9%88%db%8c-%d8%b4%db%8c%d8%b7%d8%a7%d9%86-%da%86%d8%b4%d9%85-%d9%88-%da%86%d8%b1%d8%a7%d8%ba-56/
English https://www.ndbooks.com/book/satantango/