Written by a Drunk, Read by the Bewildered: My Journey Through Sátántangó

I just finished listening to László Krasznahorkai's Sátántangó, and I need to talk about it — because this book did something to me that no novel has done in a very long time. It broke me first, then rebuilt me, and I'm still not sure I came out the same person on the other side.

Blaming Myself

For the first stretch of the book, I was convinced the problem was me. Hungarian names are not easy on a foreign ear — they tangle, they blur into one another, they refuse to stay pinned to the characters they belong to. So when I couldn't follow the narrative, when the story seemed to drift and circle and lose itself in the mud, I assumed I was the faulty one. I wasn't reading carefully enough. I wasn't paying attention. I was missing something.

I wasn't missing anything. The book was doing exactly what it was designed to do.

The Revelation

Here is what I eventually understood, and what made the whole experience flip from frustrating to extraordinary: the narrative reads the way it does because it is, in essence, written by a drunk. Not metaphorically. The doctor — that magnificent, ruined figure at the heart of the novel — is the one assembling this world for us. A man soaked in pálinka, days without food, barely upright, scribbling observations about a decaying estate from his window. Of course the narrative wanders. Of course it circles back on itself. Of course the details are sometimes maddeningly precise about things that don't matter and hopelessly vague about things that do. That's how a brilliant drunkard writes.

And here I was, reading a Nobel Prize–worthy work of literature, thinking it was poorly written. The joke was on me — and it's a magnificent joke.

The Rain. My God, the Rain.

I need to talk about the rain. It never stops. It is always raining in Sátántangó. The mud is everywhere. People are constantly falling in it, trudging through it, soaked by it. The entire world of the novel is waterlogged, heavy, sinking. It's oppressive in a way that starts to feel physical — you don't just read the rain, you feel it on your skin, in your bones. I live in Luxembourg, and I swear, from now on, every grey drizzle will transport me straight back to that godforsaken Hungarian estate. Every puddle will be a portal.

When Is This?

One of the most disorienting aspects of the book is its refusal to anchor you in time. For long stretches, I genuinely could not tell whether I was in the Middle Ages, the 1800s, the interwar years, or some post-apocalyptic ruin. The world is so stripped down, so elemental — mud, churches, crude technology, bodies in rooms — that it could be any century of misery.

Then a car appears. Then someone mentions the sound of a plane. Then, absurdly, a bartender is smacking a television set, and suddenly you're yanked into something resembling modernity. But even then, the novel resists letting you settle. It keeps you in that fog of temporal dislocation, never quite sure what year you're standing in. And I think that's the point — this is a story about a place where time has essentially stopped, where nothing moves forward, where the rain just keeps falling on the same mud it fell on yesterday and the day before that.

The Checkered Jacket and the Red Tie

Then there's Irimiás — that extraordinary, contradictory figure in his checkered jacket and red tie. I still picture a kind of chess-patterned blazer, absurdly flamboyant for the world he moves through. In the police station he's almost a dandy; in other chapters he's stoic, calculating, even sinister. He is noble to mothers and cruel to followers. He inspires devotion and orchestrates betrayal. He is messianic and fraudulent at the same time. I still don't fully understand the police scenes, the secret agent subplot, the explosives. Maybe I'm not supposed to. Maybe the drunk doctor doesn't understand them either.

The Book That Writes Itself

This is where Sátántangó ascends from a great novel to something genuinely astonishing. The doctor, that pálinka-soaked observer, doesn't just narrate the world — he writes it. You see him attempt it, fail, try again, and then, on the third attempt, he produces a passage that is unmistakably the opening of the very book you are reading. The creation meets the creator. The text loops back on itself like the tango of its title — forward, backward, always returning.

Years ago, I read Miguel de Unamuno's Niebla — Fog — and was thrilled by that moment when the character Augusto marches into Salamanca to confront his own author. "What are you doing with my life?" he demands, and Unamuno replies, coolly, that he can do whatever he wants, because whatever he writes becomes reality for his creation. It's a scene that still gives me chills.

Sátántangó pulls off something similar, but more subtly, more devastatingly. There is no dramatic confrontation between character and author. Instead, the doctor simply sits down and begins to write, and the text he produces becomes the text we've been reading all along. It's a quieter trick, but once you see it, the entire novel reorganizes itself in your mind. Every wandering sentence, every drunken digression, every maddening lack of structure — it all makes sense. It was all by design.

The Trip

I keep coming back to this word: trip. Not in the sense of travel, but in the sense of a hallucinogenic experience. Reading Sátántangó felt like being injected with someone else's fever dream. There are moments of startling beauty and moments of absolute squalor. There are reincarnations out of nowhere. There is a cruelty toward small creatures that is almost unbearable. And through it all, the rain keeps falling, and the sentences keep spiraling, and you just have to surrender to the current.

This is not a usual novel. It does not behave the way novels are supposed to behave. It does not comfort, it does not resolve, it does not reward the reader with clarity. And yet — and here is what I can't quite get over — it is magnificent. Once I understood that the chaos was intentional, that the confusion was the art, something unlocked. I stopped fighting the book and let it wash over me, like the rain over that estate.

An Irreverent Injection of Creativity

I came to Sátántangó after loving Unamuno's Niebla years ago, and the two books now feel like they belong in conversation with each other — works that refuse to stay inside the frame, that let the machinery of fiction show through the seams. They are irreverent in the deepest sense: they do not bow to the conventions of storytelling, and they dare you to keep up.

Sátántangó has left a curious, persistent mark on me. It's the kind of book that doesn't sit neatly on a shelf in your memory but instead leaks into your daily life. It rains in Luxembourg, and I think of the estate. I see a checkered pattern and think of Irimiás. I watch someone stumble and think of the mud.

What a great, bewildering, exhilarating trip. I went in confused. I came out changed. And I think that's exactly what Krasznahorkai intended.