László Krasznahorkai came to the attention of most Anglophone readers, appropriately, the year the world was supposed to end, in 2000, when The Melancholy of Resistance was translated into English – followed shortly thereafter by a film adaptation of the novel, Werckmeister Harmonies (directed by Béla Tarr). By that time, Krasznahorkai was already well established in Europe as a major voice. The year before, War & War (1999) had been published in Hungarian, completing the spiritual trilogy that began in 1985 with Satantango, a debut novel unlike any other – an existential loop, a perpetual one-step-forward-one-step-back, composed of long, unparagraphed passages that seem to get more and more claustrophobic as they grow.

If Krasznahorkai had stopped writing then, these three novels alone would have been enough to make him a permanent Nobel contender. Since then, however, he has published four more novels, five novellas, two collections of stories, and to date has collaborated with Tarr on six of his films. For many, including myself, the prize seemed inevitable.

Krasznahorkai was born in Hungary and has lived in Germany, New York City and Croatia, all of which appear in his fictions. Satantango, Melancholy, and parts of War & War all take place in some rundown town at the end of the line. They feel like ruinous visions, the dead-end state of Soviet communism, or the nuclear apocalypse that came after it, but they are also, equally, metaphysical landscapes, the Eastern Bloc of the mind. The affinity for villages is something Krasznahorkai seems to have inherited from Kafka: the archetypical is found in the smallest of places. Any one of them could be a stand-in for Gyula, where Krasznahorkai was born, in 1954, on the far side of Hungary’s great plains, a seemingly endless flatness that appears so often in Tarr’s films, where a train could crawl for miles across the horizon without ever appearing to move.

The worlds that Krasznahorkai’s characters inhabit are easily a kind of no-place (the perpetual Beckettian ‘a country road, a tree’) but they also cannot be separated from the Eastern European milieu in which they originated. As the self-appointed gatekeeper of Europe, ever fearful of foreign invasion, Hungary has long seen itself as being on the edge of an abyss. The paranoid imagination, the conspiratorial tendencies, the impending sense of doom – all things that have frighteningly recrudesced in European politics in recent years – can be found in Krasznahorkai’s novels, played out via a familiar conceit: the stranger that comes to town. In Satantango, the people of a little village are put under the spell of an enigmatic con-man posing as a saviour. In The Melancholy of Resistance, a strange ‘circus’ shows up, whose only exhibition is a dead whale displayed in a container, while at the same time the arrival of a mysterious ‘Prince’ and his disciples bring with them a sense of ‘ever-spreading all-consuming chaos’.

Krasznahorkai’s characters are usually psych-ward savants, or Palookaville prophets, utterly convinced of their own epiphanies. In War & War, Korin, an archivist in a small Hungarian municipality discovers a manuscript that he believes contains ‘eternal truth’ and travels to New York City (‘the very centre of the world’) to upload it to cyberspace, where it will live forever. In Spadework for a Palace, a librarian named herman melvill wanders the streets of Manhattan, pondering its monstrous architecture and envisioning the creation of a great library that will remain permanently locked, with himself as its sole keeper. And in Krasznahorkai’s latest novel, Herscht 00769, the protagonist, Florian, becomes obsessed with Baryon asymmetry, the unequal ratio of matter to antimatter that emerged in the early universe – the ‘contingency’ on which all existence hangs, which neither general relativity nor standard models of particle physics can explain – and writes a flurry of letters to Angela Merkel, pleading with her to make it a matter of national security.

The only form that can accommodate such pathology, such crazed freight, is monologue. The monologue is the house of the maniac, for whom all agonies are interrelated. But unlike say, the rants of Thomas Bernhard, which are continuously re-upping its agitations, Krasznahorkai’s monologues are like failed expeditions, attempts to find a new route, but which always end up taking one back along the same streets (again, faithfully rendered in the long, ponderous tracking shots of Tarr’s films). The prose feels so measured, so architectural, that one nearly forgets they are reading in translation. Hungarian, an agglutinative language with rhythms and inflections quite foreign to English, is notoriously difficult to learn and surely to translate. Credit should also be given therefore to Krasznahorkai’s English translators: George Szirtes, John Batki, and Ottilie Mulzet.

Like Beckett and Kafka, Krasznahorkai’s work seems to occupy an allegorical space, which stands in for something else, but the something else has long since packed up and left. An allegory with no external references is like a frame that encloses no picture. It directs us only towards what’s not there. Allegory also presupposes understanding, with levels of order and interpretation that one ascends, taking one closer to the object of knowledge. In Krasznahorkai’s novels, this interpretative impulse is set loose – his characters are constantly trying to break out of the framework they inhabit – but without direction. It is a runaway theology in a universe with no logos. It leads them back only to their own incomprehension.

I often think that if there is an aesthetic principle (of the kind Flaubert spoke of) that holds fast the disastrous worlds of Krasznahorkai’s fictions – their ruinous unities, the utter hopelessness of their oppressed creatures – it is the ‘imminence of a revelation which does not occur’, as Borges described it, which is the spirit of our time. The Melancholy of Resistance, perhaps his greatest work, fittingly opens with a non-event, as characters wait at an ice-choked railway station for a train that fails to arrive. Always, there is the sense that the moment of awakening is at hand, but it never seems to come. It is the high irony of Christian millenarianism, which we have all internalised: the Messiah has already come, His revelation has been heard, the end of all things is nigh, and yet here we remain, with nowhere to go.