László Krasznahorkai's island of doubt

For the Nobel Prize winning writer, his famously long sentences are philosophical rather than stylistic choices

- Somak Ghoshal

Last month when the winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature was announced, millions of readers heard of the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai for the first time. Once the news was out, media platforms from around the world seemed to fixate on a single aspect of his enormous genius: Krasznahorkai's famously difficult sentences, which often run for pages, making his writing unique, even inaccessible, to a cross-section of readers.

Considering Krasznahorkai's experiments with the Hungarian language, it must be notoriously tough to render his work into English. Even so, his novels have reached Anglophone readers due to the efforts of his translators, George Szirtes, Ottillie Mulzet and John Batki. In spite of the undeniable greatness of his work—I use the term here with the full awareness of its weight-his books will appeal only to a niche, and that is of a piece with who he is, both as a writer and human being.

For the vast majority, Krasznahorkai's novels are obtuse, a test of their patience. And not only is the writer aware of this effect, he also owns it with equanimity. In a Paris Review interview with Adam Thirlwell in 2018, he spoke of the distinction of his novels in no uncertain terms. "Occasionally a very high-level literary work happens to say something on the mid-range level and reaches more readers," he put it. "My novels absolutely don't work on the mid-level because I don't ever compromise."

In India, Krasznahorkai's work gained currency among select readers in 2013, when the writer visited the country for the first time to participate in the Almost Island Dialogues, an annual literary convention curated by poet, writer and translator Sharmistha Mohanty, who is also the publisher of an online magazine of the same name. Mohanty had previously interviewed the reclusive writer during a trip to Budapest which was published in