If you follow the Körös further, you will come to Gyula, near the Romanian border, where another Almásy manor sits. László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, and a fictionalized, never-named setting of Gyula is what most obviously unites Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming with those three works that Krasznahorkai now deems its predecessors. Satantango’s fools moved into the manor of Almásy-kastély, much of Melancholy’s story took place around Gyula’s Komló Hotel, and Korin discovers the manuscript central to War & War in a small Hungarian town 220 km southeast of Budapest. Gyula is 220 km southeast of Budapest.

Krasznahorkai’s Gyula adds and subtracts from the real Gyula; 36 Béla Wenckheim Avenue, where György Eszter and later Tünde Eszter live in Melancholy, does not exist as far as I can tell. But for our purposes, the important thing is that in all of these books, it is the same, unnamed city, sitting near the Romanian border on the Southern Great Plain of Hungary.

The Baron Béla Wenckheim of this book is an undistinguished cousin of the Prime Minister. The Baron returns to Hungary in disgrace after amassing huge gambling debts in Argentina. He is in his mid-60s, but his mind has been organically degenerating for several decades. He is a tall, pale specter who has difficulty even putting himself forth in the world. His unsympathetic family permits him to return to his hometown (the unnamed Gyula) with his clothes and some money, demanding that he disappear and no longer embarrass them. Still, the Baron is grateful:

…he was perfectly aware that he was an idiot, but even so he could understand what was being said to him, so how could he not understand this warning, especially from those to whom he owed his life, or, to put it more succinctly, a more dignified death…

The townspeople, however, know nothing of this, and on hearing of his imminent return, assume that the Baron has descended from the noble heavens in order to renew and elevate their small city. Celebrations are planned, hopes are raised, the future is deemed to be bright—not just bright, but transcendent. The Baron in turn knows nothing of their expectations, and only hopes to reunite with his childhood sweetheart Marika.

Far more than Krasznahorkai’s other novels, this is a book in which things fail to happen, in which characters fail to understand each other, in which causation fails to manifest, in which explanation is impossible. It resists coherence and interpretation as much as anything by Beckett or Tzara (albeit more subtly), and so it vexes attempts at analysis. A reviewer must settle, then, for providing an incomplete roadmap to Krasznahorkai’s labyrinths and abysses, marking the bottomless potholes while avoiding them.

Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming begins, before even the title page and copyright, with a “Warning” from a conductor to an orchestra, speaking as though the novel itself is a piece of music—a music now available in English through Ottilie Mulzet’s work in translating it from the Hungarian. And I read Homecoming less as a conclusion to a four-book series than as the final movement of a symphony. I thought of Alfred Schnittke’s staggering First Symphony in particular, alongside Galina Ustvolskaya, Witold Lutosławski, Francisco Guerrero, Francis Dhomont, and Toru Takemitsu. All of these composers obscure the line between music and noise, between heavenly and demoniacal, and between order and chaos—all while remaining estranged from familiar forms, no matter how close they may come to mimicking them.

So before we go deeper, it is best to return to the beginning—da capo al fine, as Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming puts it in its table of contents (labeled “Dance Card”)—and retrace the steps that the reader and Krasznahorkai have made to get here.

1. Satantango: You Are (Not) Alone

Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming shares its closest ties (some of which should be left a surprise to readers) with the first book of the quartet. In both, an ensemble cast of predominantly unsympathetic losers see their salvation in the near-messianic arrival of a figure long thought lost: Irimiás in Satantango, and the Baron in Homecoming. That the figures themselves are almost polar opposites, a satanic trickster and a holy fool respectively, belies the shared delusion that overtakes the townspeople and their desperate adherence to it.

Other reversals come into play. The ruined Almásy Manor, which Irimiás proposed as the new communal home for the pathetic estate residents of Satantango, has become Almásy Chateau in Homecoming, home to an orphanage which is quickly relocated so that the Baron may be fêted and his favor won. While Irimiás promised some sort of spiritual-communal uplift, the officials and citizens of Homecoming are far more vulgar in their hopes, wishing for the Baron to raise their town to prosperity and restore their long-lost national (and ethnic) pride. While Krasznahorkai avoids any specific reference to contemporary political events, web sites and cell phones indicate that Homecoming is taking place very much in the age of Fidesz and Jobbik, much as Satantango bore the marks of the Communist era.

Yet Satantango’s chain of cause and effect is lost in Homecoming. The Baron does not offer anything, nor do the townspeople think to question their dreams. There is no triggering crisis in Homecoming as there was in Satantango when young Esti Horgos killed herself, only the pervasive stench of petty corruption and civic atrophy.

Satantango also introduced Krasznahorkai’s ongoing concern with the infinite—the numerical infinite in particular. This concern reached its most explicit portrayal in From the North by Hill, From the South by Lake, From the West by Roads, From the East by River, still unavailable in English, which describes a book by “Sir Wilford Stanley Gilmore of the Gilmore-Grothendieck-Nelson Research Institute of Mathematics,” who tries to prove that infinity does not exist:

reality knows no infinite number, an infinite quantity does not exist for reality, because reality exists solely in finite domains otherwise existence itself, reality itself, would be impossible …

Sir Wilford then descends into a torrent of profanity directed at mathematician Georg Cantor, the discoverer of transfinite numbers. The infinite is an emotional and metaphysical matter—often a torturous one—in Krasznahorkai, but it has rarely taken center stage. In Satantango, infinity only manifests briefly in the fourth chapter, “The Work of the Spider (∞),” where the local bar’s landlord rants about Irimiás while tallying up his accounts:

Fully absorbed, he gazed at the column of numbers sloping right to left with pride while feeling an infinite hatred for the world that made it possible for filthy scoundrels to target people like him for their latest outrage … So now, as so often before, he took refuge in numbers. Because there is in numbers a mysterious evidentiary quality, a stupidly undervalued “grave simplicity” and, as a product of the tension between these two ideas a spine-tingling concept might arise, one that proclaimed: “Perspectives do exist.” But did there exist a series of numbers that might defeat this bony, gray-haired, lifeless-looking, horse-faced heap of trash — that piece of shit, that parasite who belonged in a cesspit, known as Irimiás? What number could possibly vanquish that infinitely treacherous scoundrel straight from hell? Treacherous? Unfathomable? There weren’t words for him! No description could do him justice. Words wouldn’t do it — it wasn’t a matter of words. Sheer strength was required. That’s what was needed to put paid to him! Strength, not a lot of feeble chatter! He drew a line through what he had written but the numbers behind the lines remained legible, sparkling with significance. It was no longer just a matter of the beer, soft drinks and wine to be found in various cases, as far as the landlord was concerned. Far from it! The numbers were becoming ever more significant. He couldn’t help noticing that as the importance of the numbers grew, so did he. He was positively swelling. The greater the significance of the numbers the “greater my own significance.” For a couple of years now the consciousness of his own extraordinary grandeur had constrained him. [emphasis mine]

It’s no good; in enticing the locals into his scheme and away from the landlord’s bar, Irimiás ruins the landlord’s livelihood. Irimiás promises them, with total insincerity, a new world: “feeling elated by their ‘brilliant future prospects,’ they trusted the new would not only replace the old but utterly erase it.” So to, do a later generation expect the same from Baron Wenckheim.

Satantango plays around with this sort of millenarism: fools want it, tricksters promise it, nobody gets it. And yet there are glimpses of something that reaches beyond the ordinary. Most strikingly, there is Irimiás’s surreal vision of Esti’s body, which he quickly is at pains to denounce as being false. But the landlord’s tentative encounter with infinity is one as well.

All Irimiás delivers, by his own admission, is “that enormous spiderweb, as woven and patented by me, Irimiás.” In contrast to the infinite, Satantango presents the recurrent image of a spider’s web, trapping all of life and enclosing it in a manmade labyrinth in which we all struggle to find the way out. The infinite, at least hypothetically, is the way out. The infinite, which itself stands in for many other ineffable concepts, is “real” in that it is not an imaginary chimera (despite Sir Wilford Stanley Gilmore’s protestations), but infinity cannot be made to work for us. Bear that in mind.

2. The Melancholy of Resistance: You Can (Not) Advance

The word “apocalypse” is perhaps more associated with Krasznahorkai than any other, and yet the word is, at least etymologically, as inappropriate as could be imagined. “Apocalypse” derives from the Greek apokaluptein, where apo- is a negating prefix and kaluptein means “to cover or hide.” kaluptein is the source of Calypso’s name in the Odyssey, for she enchants Odysseus’s mind and hides him from the world for seven years before Zeus has Hermes demand that Calypso set him free. kaluptein itself likely derives from the Proto-Indo-European root kel-, from which we also get “hell,” literally meaning “covered or concealed place.”

An apocalypse, then, is an uncovering, an extrication from the labyrinth and spider’s web, an un-hell-ing. Yet very little is ever uncovered in Krasznahorkai’s novels; any momentary revelation is negated, revealed to be fake, or forgotten. The Melancholy of Resistance presents a seeming apocalypse, and yet it ends with more or less the same elements with which it began, violently shaken, stirred, and reshuffled.

The sympathetic shut-in György Eszter comes to a similar conclusion while speaking to the awe-struck naïf Valuska:

“people are talking about apocalypse and the last judgement, because they do not know that there will be neither apocalypse nor last judgement … such things would serve no purpose since the world will quite happily fall apart by itself and go to wrack and ruin so that everything may begin again, and so proceed ad infinitum, and this is as perfectly clear,” he raised his eyes to the ceiling, “as our helpless orbiting in space: once started it cannot be stopped.”

What we see as apocalypse is, rather, a very partial and limited glimpse of infinite, chaotic Heraclitan flux. There are those who seek to control and leverage this chaos, namely Eszter’s estranged wife Tünde, who hopes that a local state of emergency will enable her to enact “sweeping changes leading to something new, something of infinite promise.” This infinite promise is as vacuous as any of Irimiás’s rhetoric in Satantango; Mrs. Eszter is, much like Irimiás, entirely a creature of our mundane world. Yet this emergency is handily provided by the monstrous Prince, a chattering demagogue who arrives with a traveling circus. Through his factotum, he proclaims the meaningless of all that is finite and demands the destruction of all things:

[The Prince] says, he is always free in himself. His position is between things. And in between things he sees that he is himself the sum of things. And what things add up to is ruin, nothing but ruin. … Only he can see the whole, he says, because he can see there is no whole. … His followers will wreak havoc because they understand his vision perfectly. His followers understand that all things are false pride, but don’t know why.

When the Prince speaks, the string is untuned and discord follows. One follower describes the Prince’s magnetic hold on his followers:

we saw that nothing was impossible now, convinced that all common everyday knowledge was useless, understood that what we did was meaningless since we were only a moment’s victims in an infinitely vast arena, that from such an ephemeral position there was no way of estimating the precise magnitude of that vastness, for the force of sheer velocity can know nothing of the nature of a speck of drifting dust, for motion and object can have no consciousness of each other.

But this abyssal force dissipates. The pseudo-apocalyptic riot in the night collapses and shatters its psychotic participants:

the cohesive force of uncontrollable disgust had vanished to leave behind some twenty to thirty crumpled, introspective individuals who half suspected, half knew, but did not care what was to happen next because they had entered some empty, infinitely empty, terrain which not only had trapped them but was preventing them even forming the desire to escape.

What’s uncovered is covered again, and we are back in hell, in the labyrinth we have constructed.

At the end of Melancholy, Mrs. Eszter is the tyrannical new Mayor. By the time of Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, the Mayor of this fictional Gyula is a pompous would-be oligarch, high on his own self-inflation and his fantasy that the Baron will be his vehicle to real power. Where Mrs. Eszter toyed with crisis and infinity, the new Mayor is entirely oblivious to them, the epitome of an empty suit.

Krasznahorkai invokes the term “infinite” very selectively. It nearly always signals a realm other than that of the human, which Krasznahorkai has described in an interview:

Sometimes, in my case, if I see, for example, in the Louvre a small picture by Fra Angelico of three small angels—it’s so unbelievably beautiful and there’s a border, and beyond this border comes a kind of ecstasy. Ecstasy is not a normal state, of course, in ecstasy you can weep. Because there’s a border, and beyond this border the beauty is almost unbearable. … [Beauty can take us to] Our limit and absolute infinite space, which really exists. And the way, the direction of this beauty, greatness, is the same, beyond this border, and we can never cross this border. We can only stay on this side of the border.

In the novel’s central metaphor, Eszter incites a musical apocalypse by searching for this infinite space. He seeks to rediscover a higher form of harmony in which Bach’s music can be played with wholly pure intervals, instead of the imperfectly tempered ones which inform Western music to this day. He fails, as it is an impossible task, and only creates horrible dissonance. (I have discussed how tuning theory informs Melancholy in “The Pythagorean Comma and the Howl of the Wolf.”) In short, it is a metaphor indicating the impossibility and danger of going beyond the limits of human, which is to say, the limits of reality and the finite. Valuska is infatuated with the harmony of the celestial spheres, but his sheer sensitivity to the infinite renders him an inevitable casualty of the forces of our world.

We readers are given one last beautiful and sublime moment of infinity in Melancholy, in a stunning description of the decomposition of a corpse which remains one of Krasznahorkai’s greatest passages. But by this point we have well left the rest of the novel, its people, and its places, behind.

To gain knowledge of this other side is profound, but it is also torture. Prolonged exposure may cause madness, and it inevitably draws one away from our mundane world. Eszter and particularly Valuska suffer great damage from their sensitivity to this other side—this infinity we cannot quite reach. The next novel in the sequence, like much of Krasznahorkai’s mid-period work, makes this sensitivity its primary concern.

3. War & War: You Can (Not) Redo

War & War is a novel of many apocalypses, which is to say, of none at all, since each only returns us to where we started. It is an elusive book, the scherzo in the sequence, an unexpected departure in several contrasting parts. It begins with the story of the researcher György Korin, who after a near-breakdown discovers a strange manuscript in a Gyula archive which he is determined to publish online from the center of the world: New York City.

The manuscript is a surreal travelogue in which four travelers appear, non-chronologically, at various fulcrum points in history, from the destruction of Bronze Age Crete to Columbus’s discovery of the Americas and beyond. Throughout they are trailed and plagued by the sulfuric figure of Mastemann, who always heralds the arrival of “this new world, a world born diseased,” even though he promises one born of reason and progress. The four gentle figures themselves, whom Krasznahorkai has termed angels, have a great appreciation for natural and manmade beauty, and an increasingly pained awareness of the costs demanded by such beauty. As the traveler Falke says of the great Cologne Cathedral,

weak and feeble man was capable of creating a universe that far exceeded himself, since ultimately it was this that was great and entrancing here, this tower man raised to soar way beyond himself, and that man was capable of raising something so much greater than his own petty being, said Falke, the way he grasped the vastness he himself created, the way he defended himself by producing this brilliant, beautiful and unforgettable, yet moving, poignant, thing, because of course he was not capable of governing such grandeur, unable to handle something so enormous, and it would collapse and the edifice he had created would tumble about his ears so the whole thing would have to start all over again, and so it would go on ad infìnitum, said Falke, the systematic preparation for failure changing nothing in the desire to create ever greater and greater monuments that collapsed, it being a natural product of an eternal desire to resolve an all-consuming, overwhelming tension between the creator of vast and tiny things.

A landlord of the Cologne inn insists that he recognizes the four as heroes of the bloody Battle of Königgrätz three years earlier, in 1866, where 43,000 men had died in a single day. The four know nothing of it, but a look at the four’s preoccupations points to a certain duality in them: