At 5:40 he says that compulsory military service had an exhausting effect on him, but he does not claim that it was brutal (though, the two doesn't contradict each other). When he refers to Dostoevsky ('oppressed and miserable' in the subtitle), he literally quotes the title of the novel 'Humiliated and Insulted' in Hungarian translation. At 10:20 he says that the Roma ghetto had to be eliminated (not counted). At 11:20 the number of cows is 309, not 390 (not so important, after all). At 16:30 he refers to himself as a 'helpless' (gyámoltalan) not 'cowardly' (gyáva) boy. At 17:25 he applies a slightly different idiom for 'I couldn't stop' (literally: there was no turning back on the slope). At 20:10 he doesn't say 'comedy' (vígjáték), but 'endgame' (végjáték)! Some of these seem to be significant details.
Laszlo Krasznahorkai says paradoxically that his books aren't about giving up hope, but they show an absurdity in all the hopeful characters. And, too, an absurdity with the fearful ones. Maybe fear is the other side of the absurd coin. And you can be either hopeful or fearful or nothing at all.
The heroes are also at the mercy of all they do to avoid the Human Comedy that a vulgar audience expects. To deprive those heroes of the buffer they erect between themselves and the vulgar laughter of the audience, is not art. Even if it is Honore de Balzac who does it. It is not done by artists. It shouldn't be done by anyone, unless they are, like Honore de Balzac, not artists but politicians. Or better, evildoers taken for politicians.
Louisiana channel?! I had no idea there was any interest in a rather oblique, intellectually challenging Hungarian writer in Louisiana. Just goes to show my prejudice, I suppose.
@@mtache4652 Which I guess makes more sense, although the brief moment I, too, thought this was from maybe a Louisiana public broadcaster or the like was a very satisfying one. That would have been kind of amazing. Lovely interview, in any case - he tells such interesting stories here too, in a way that's informative, entertaining and poetic at the same time.
Apocalyptic, strictly, and significantly, speaking is an ancient gnre, and would be an appalling anachronism if that were what the Krasz. is about... his engagement with hope is something quite else, if itself a lucid response to the withdrawl of the applicability, the appeal to or of, the emotional economy of said apocalyptic. I stood at dawn on Waterloo Br. with XR, having spent the night reading Calasso's The Unnameable Present, and as the breeze came up the Thames from the sea, like the fingers of a thieving hand into the unusually still city, i was most forcibly struck by the inevitable extinction that we face, some day, somehow, in a mortal fluction of the physical universe in which we might conceivably run but never hise, and i thought then of the Kras. when considering the implicit uncoupling of the fate of the individual, the species, the World and the Whole... these are the thoughts and feelings no-one has so sharpened, cut themselves upon before, whereas mortality per se, well what will ever better Gilgamesh, Homer etc? Lovely to hear him tyalk so quietly, and with such peaceful venom....
he's only told you what you already knew... (our embarresment is that inheritd wisdom is "not a good sales' pitch"....) To tell the same forever... it takes invention....
At 5:40 he says that compulsory military service had an exhausting effect on him, but he does not claim that it was brutal (though, the two doesn't contradict each other). When he refers to Dostoevsky ('oppressed and miserable' in the subtitle), he literally quotes the title of the novel 'Humiliated and Insulted' in Hungarian translation. At 10:20 he says that the Roma ghetto had to be eliminated (not counted). At 11:20 the number of cows is 309, not 390 (not so important, after all). At 16:30 he refers to himself as a 'helpless' (gyámoltalan) not 'cowardly' (gyáva) boy. At 17:25 he applies a slightly different idiom for 'I couldn't stop' (literally: there was no turning back on the slope). At 20:10 he doesn't say 'comedy' (vígjáték), but 'endgame' (végjáték)! Some of these seem to be significant details.
Thank you for these corrections!
Laszlo Krasznahorkai says paradoxically that his books aren't about giving up hope, but they show an absurdity in all the hopeful characters. And, too, an absurdity with the fearful ones. Maybe fear is the other side of the absurd coin. And you can be either hopeful or fearful or nothing at all.
A wonderful and fascinating author who writes as well as Gabriel García Marquez...
cool story, great movies, and lit
Louisiana is a Cajun jam.
The heroes are also at the mercy of all they do to avoid the Human Comedy that a vulgar audience expects. To deprive those heroes of the buffer they erect between themselves and the vulgar laughter of the audience, is not art. Even if it is Honore de Balzac who does it. It is not done by artists. It shouldn't be done by anyone, unless they are, like Honore de Balzac, not artists but politicians. Or better, evildoers taken for politicians.
You are a soft romantic.
Louisiana channel?! I had no idea there was any interest in a rather oblique, intellectually challenging Hungarian writer in Louisiana. Just goes to show my prejudice, I suppose.
...
the channel belongs to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark
@@mtache4652 Which I guess makes more sense, although the brief moment I, too, thought this was from maybe a Louisiana public broadcaster or the like was a very satisfying one. That would have been kind of amazing.
Lovely interview, in any case - he tells such interesting stories here too, in a way that's informative, entertaining and poetic at the same time.
Apocalyptic, strictly, and significantly, speaking is an ancient gnre, and would be an appalling anachronism if that were what the Krasz. is about... his engagement with hope is something quite else, if itself a lucid response to the withdrawl of the applicability, the appeal to or of, the emotional economy of said apocalyptic. I stood at dawn on Waterloo Br. with XR, having spent the night reading Calasso's The Unnameable Present, and as the breeze came up the Thames from the sea, like the fingers of a thieving hand into the unusually still city, i was most forcibly struck by the inevitable extinction that we face, some day, somehow, in a mortal fluction of the physical universe in which we might conceivably run but never hise, and i thought then of the Kras. when considering the implicit uncoupling of the fate of the individual, the species, the World and the Whole... these are the thoughts and feelings no-one has so sharpened, cut themselves upon before, whereas mortality per se, well what will ever better Gilgamesh, Homer etc? Lovely to hear him tyalk so quietly, and with such peaceful venom....
he's only told you what you already knew... (our embarresment is that inheritd wisdom is "not a good sales' pitch"....) To tell the same forever... it takes invention....