The passage displays many of Krasznahorkai’s qualities: the relentless ongoingness of the syntax; the way Korin’s mind stretches and then turns back, like a lunatic scorpion trying to sting itself; the perfect comic placement of the final phrase. The prose has a kind of self-correcting shuffle, as if something were genuinely being worked out, and yet, painfully and humorously, these corrections never result in the correct answer. As in Thomas Bernhard, whose influence can be felt in Krasznahorkai’s work, a single word or compound (“puzzle,” “world-puzzle”) is seized and worried at, murdered into unmeaning, so that its repetition begins to seem at once funny and alarming. Whereas the characters in Bernhard’s work engage in elegant, even oddly formal rants—which can be removed from the fictions and performed as bitterly comic set pieces—Krasznahorkai pushes the long sentence to its furthest extreme, miring it in a thick, recalcitrant atmosphere, a dynamic paralysis in which the mind turns over and over to no obvious effect.

In “War and War”—whose epigraph is “Heaven is sad”—Korin has found a manuscript in the archive where he works. He came across the text, which seems to date from the early nineteen-forties, in a box labelled “Family Papers of No Particular Significance.” This text is a fictional narrative about four men, named Kasser, Falke, Bengazza, and Toót, who have various adventures, from Crete to Cologne and the North of England, and in different historical periods. Korin is overwhelmed by the beauty of this unknown manuscript; the moment he took it out of its box, “his life changed forever.” Already unstable, he decides that the manuscript holds a religious or visionary answer to the “puzzle” of his life. He feels sure that it is really “speaking about the Garden of Eden,” and decides that he must go to what he thinks of as “the very center of the world, the place where matters were actually decided, where things happened, a place such as Rome had been, ancient Rome, where decisions had been made and events set in motion, to find that place and then quit everything.” He decides that this place is New York. There he will publish the manuscript by typing it up and posting it on the Internet. Then, he thinks, his life will come to an end.

László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, in southeast Hungary, in 1954. He has lived in both Germany and America, but his name is more familiar in Europe than it is here. (In Germany, he is almost canonical, partly because of the amount of time he has spent there and his fluency in German, and is spoken of as a potential Nobel laureate.) He is probably best known through the oeuvre of the director Béla Tarr, who has collaborated with him on several movies, including “Damnation,” “Werckmeister Harmonies” (Tarr’s version of “The Melancholy of Resistance”), and the vast, overwhelming “Sátántangó,” which runs to more than seven hours. These are bleak, cavernous works, which in their spectral black-and-whiteness, sparse dialogue and reticent scores, seem to want to revert to silent pictures, and they offer a filmmaker’s analogue of Krasznahorkai’s serpentine sentences in their tracking shots, which can last as long as ten minutes: in “Werckmeister Harmonies,” the camera accompanies two characters, Mr. Eszter and Valuska, as they walk through the streets of a gray provincial town; the wordless, protracted ambulation seems almost to occur in real time. Throughout the film, the camera lingers on the blank, illuminated face of Valuska (a naïve and troubled visionary) with the devotion of a believer kissing an icon. “Sátántangó” uses a complex tango-like structure (six steps forward, six back) to present the tableau of a collective farm on the brink of collapse. It is famous for its long, uncut shots, such as one of villagers drunkenly dancing (an intoxication that, according to Tarr, was not fictional).

For all their daring and austerity, these works cannot replicate the peculiar engrossment of Krasznahorkai’s prose (nor, of course, do they exactly seek to). “Werckmeister Harmonies” simplifies considerably the political machinations of the villagers in “The Melancholy of Resistance,” at the cost of pushing the story toward a Central European magic realism. So readers of English await more of Krasznahorkai’s fiction, and are, seemingly, reliant on Szirtes, his translator, and on the enlightened largesse—for that is what it is—of New Directions. His work tends to get passed around like rare currency. I first heard of “The Melancholy of Resistance” when a freakishly well-read Romanian graduate student handed me a copy, convinced that I would like it. I opened it, was slightly excited and slightly alienated by that typographic lava flow, and then put the book on a shelf, in the resignedly optimistic way in which one deals with difficult work—one day, one day. The sense of somewhat cultic excitement persists, apparently. While I was taking notes on these books, a Hungarian woman stopped at my table in a café and asked me why I was studying this particular author. She knew his work; indeed, she knew the author (and had, she said, gone to see “Pulp Fiction” with him in Boston, when it came out), and she wanted to talk to me now about this writer.

The excitement has something to do with Krasznahorkai’s literary mysteriousness. Thomas Bernhard’s world, by comparison, is at once reasonable and insane. A pianist and writer, say, recalls a friend who committed suicide and their interaction with Glenn Gould. This book—Bernhard’s “The Loser”—is an extreme form of unreliable first-person narration but at least conforms to a basic generic conventionality. Even if the sentences are difficult, such a world is comprehensible, even desperately logical. But the abysses in Krasznahorkai are bottomless and far from logical. In Krasznahorkai, we often have no idea what is motivating the fictions. Reading him is a little like seeing a group of people standing in a circle in a town square, apparently warming their hands at a fire, only to discover, as one gets closer, that there is no fire, and that they are gathered around nothing at all.

In “War and War,” Korin travels to New York, finds lodgings with a Hungarian interpreter, Mr. Sárváry, gets a computer, and begins to type the text of the transcendently important manuscript. But the desperation of his attachment to this text is equalled only by his inability to describe its actual import:

It took no more than the first three sentences to convince him that he was in the presence of an extraordinary document, something so out of the ordinary, Korin informed Mr. Sárváry, that he would go so far as to say that it, that is to say the work that had come into his possession, was a work of astonishing, foundation-shaking cosmic genius, and, thinking so, he continued to read and reread the sentences till dawn and beyond, and no sooner had the sun risen but it was dark again, about six in the evening, and he knew, he absolutely knew, that he had to do something about the vast thoughts forming in his head, thoughts that involved making major decisions about life and death, about not returning the manuscript to the archive but ensuring its immortality in some appropriate place . . . for he had to make this knowledge the basis of the rest of his life, and Mr. Sárváry should understand that this should be understood in its strictest sense, because by dawn he had really decided that, given the fact that he wanted to die in any case, and that he had stumbled on the truth, there was nothing to do but, in the strictest sense, to stake his life on immortality.

It is not just that this “truth” upon which Korin has stumbled is not defined; it is also that Krasznahorkai recesses Korin himself. The passage is third-person description, but notice the strange, unstable way in which it veers among the report of an ongoing activity (“he continued to read and reread the sentences till dawn”), the description of a mental state (“he had to do something about the vast thoughts forming in his head”), and an account of an unstoppable monologue that Korin is apparently delivering to Mr. Sárváry (“something so out of the ordinary, Korin informed Mr. Sárváry”). The entire passage, even those elements which seem anchored in objective fact, has the quality of hallucination. One senses that Korin spends all his time either manically talking to other people or manically talking to himself, and that there may not be an important difference between the two. Almost every page of “War and War” contains the phrase “said Korin,” or some variation thereon (“It was Hermes, said Korin, Hermes lay at the heart of everything”). It is a parody of the source attribution we encounter in a newspaper, whose purpose is to put such journalistic authority in doubt. At one moment in “War and War,” we get this sublime confusion: “Believe me when I say, as I said before, he said, that the whole thing is unreadable, insane!!!”