The Melancholy of Resistance

by László Krasznahorkai & translated by George Szirtes

The Melancholy of Resistance (1989) was the first novel by Hungarian novelist and Nobel laureate László Krasznahorkai to be translated into English, published in 1998. Author Ellen Mattson, a member of the Swedish Academy that decides the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, called it “my absolute favourite among Krasznahorkai’s novels.” Set in a village in the Carpathians, the story revolves around a circus coming to town with what it advertises as “the biggest whale in the world and other sensational secrets of nature.”