The books of Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai have a habit of undergoing strange transfigurations. In War & War, the character György Korin begs to see an igloo-like sculpture by the artist Mario Merz, and ends up committing suicide—whereupon the real-life Merz was so moved by this fiction that he immediately began planning a new igloo in Korin’s memory. The hellish drama of Satantango, Krasznahorkai’s first novel, originally escaped the author’s language not by translation, but by adaptation into film: Eighteen years before English readers could enjoy George Szirtes’s translation, aficionados sat through seven subtitled hours of Béla Tarr’s long takes and desolate Hungarian landscapes.

These long takes are an unexpected cousin of Krasznahorkai’s characteristic long sentences, which unfurl and cascade and run untrammeled for pages on end. Like a camera slowly panning over a boundless Mitteleuropean plain, these clauses and phrases encompass an entire world, forcing a multiplicity of meanings from discrete images. Where one word could fit, two or three are to be found; a single instant engenders five or eight or 13 perspectives.

Against all odds, this labyrinthine prose has won the writer many devotees and a place in our contemporary literary canon. Last year, when Krasznahorkai was honored with the Man Booker International Prize at the age of 61, he explained his writing to a journalist with a simplicity that bled into the perverse: “Letters; then from letters, words; then from these words, some short sentences; then more sentences that are longer, and in the main very long sentences, for the duration of 35 years. Beauty in language. Fun in hell.”

This enthralling hell is everywhere in Krasznahorkai’s work, but becomes most visibly real in the twenty-first century China described in Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens, a book-length investigation that represents a different kind of transfiguration for an author best known in the Anglophone world for his fiction. The book originally appeared in Hungarian in 2004, and is finally being published in English translation by Ottilie Mulzet this week. Subtitled Reportage, this slim volume is decidedly nonfictional; rather than peopling an imagined city, it casts a prolix eye over all the real miseries of the Middle Kingdom.

The protagonist may well be Krasznahorkai himself, but we are only ever introduced to him as “László Stein,” a visitor to China utterly dependent on an interpreter who ferries sentences between Chinese and Hungarian. The two of them take rickety buses and descend unsteady stairs carved into mountains, shiver in cold, rainy weather, and sip tea in workshops where Buddhas are carved. Stein’s hope is to find pockets of authenticity in a country being overtaken by ravenous consumerism, and to do this he and his interpreter “are now decisively avoiding everything about which they determined ... to be false, fraudulent, fake, not original, rubbish, just a bad copy.” Because so much of what they see has been erased or destroyed, each encounter with authentic history and culture feels revelatory. The first quarter of the book is given over to describing a bus trip and the two men’s arrival at a monastery, and when they finally see the peak of a mountain they are headed for, even the weather changes from rain and fog: “The sun is shining everywhere, it shines directly through the grimy windows of the minivan, every color is sharp, deep, warm, and everything is floating in the green.” But the experience is fleeting, and every such illumination is swiftly followed by further fog and darkness.