Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming - Hardcover

Krasznahorkai, Laszlo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1781258910 ISBN 13: 9781781258910

Publisher: Tuskar Rock, 2019

Synopsis

Nearing the end of his life, Baron Bela Wenckheim decides to return to the provincial Hungarian town of his birth. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he wishes to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart Marika. What follows is an endless storm of gossip, con men and local politicians, vividly evoking the small town's alternately drab and absurd existence.

Meanwhile, the Professor - a world-famous natural scientist who studies mosses and inhabits a bizarre Zen-like shack in a desolate area outside of town - offers long rants and disquisitions on his own attempts to immunise himself from thought. Spectacular actions are staged, death and the abyss loom, until finally doom is brought down on the unsuspecting residents of the town.

Hailed internationally as perhaps the most important novel of the young twenty-first century, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming is the culmination of László Krasznahorkai's remarkable and singular career.

'I've said a thousand times that I always wanted to write just one book. Now, with Baron, I can close this story. With this novel I can prove that I really wrote just one book in my life. This is the book - Satantango, Melancholy, War & War, and Baron. This is my one book.' László Krasnahorkai

About this title

Review:

Hungarian maestro László Krasznahorkai is laconic and shrewd, as practical as he is existential, capable of wresting huge laughs as well as immense profundity from the commonplace and the way in which we choose to respond to it. (Irish Times)

Krasznahorkai constantly pushes beyond the expected, escalating everything to the brink of deliriousness (The New York Times Book Review)

This vortex of a novel compares neatly with Dostoevsky and shows Krasznahorkai at the absolute summit of his decades-long project. Apocalyptic, visionary, and mad, it flies off the page and stays lodged intractably wherever it lands. (Publisher's Weekly starred review)

Astounding (Die Zeit)

A visionary (Guardian)

The contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse who inspires comparison with Gogol and Melville (Susan Sontag)

Intense and uncompromising (W. G. Sebald)

Baron Wenkcheim's Homecoming is a fitting capstone to Krasznahorkai's tetralogy, one of the supreme achievements of contemporary literature. Now seems as good a time as any to name him among our greatest living novelists. (The Paris Review)

Book Description:

The defining master-work of the Man Booker International winner's spectacular career

About this edition

• Publisher: Tuskar Rock
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1781258910
• ISBN 13: 9781781258910
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 576