Colm Tóibín: Why I set up a press to publish Nobel winner László Krasznahorkai

That Christmas – it was almost 20 years ago – I came back from America with news. My friend Daniel Medin had recommended two books to me, both by the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, one called War and War and the other The Melancholy of Resistance. We had also watched some Béla Tarr films, whose screenplays had been written by Krasznahorkai. The sense of slow, seething menace in the film Werckmeister Harmonies, based on The Melancholy of Resistance, and the lack of easy psychology and obvious motive in the film, the camera moving like a cat, made it exciting, but not as exciting as the two novels. Krasznahorkai, I noticed, loved the snaking sentence, the high-wire act, mild panic steering towards a shivering fear felt by his characters, followed, in clause after clause, by fitful realisations and further reasons for gloom or alarm, and then, with just a comma in between, ironic (and even comic) responses to what comes next into the mind. These extraordinary sentences had been translated by the poet George Szirtes with considerable rhythmic energy. Krasznahorkai – who this week was awarded the Nobel prize in literature – is concerned with limits, with what can happen if language is pushed further than its own decorous rules might suggest. Or what can happen if consciousness itself is rendered as infinite in its systems and capable of doubling back and feeding on itself before it edges forward again. Or what can happen if knowledge, or action, or memory, or voice, are each incapable of being easily tamed by narrative. For this reason, he is, as a storyteller, fascinated by extremes, by the possibility of apocalypse. It would be a mistake to read the menace in his work as either political or coming from nowhere. His imagination feeds on real fear and real violence; he has a way of making fear and violence seem all the more real and present, however, by removing them from a familiar context. He places them in a dark context of his own choosing. In this way, he stands closer to Kafka than to Beckett, but he is close to neither in his interest and delight in verbal pyrotechnics. ‘Slow, seething menace’ … a trailer for the film Werckmeister Harmonies, directed by Béla Tarr and Agnes Hranitzky and based on a Krasznahorkai novel. In 2006, when I came home all enthusiastic about his work, he still had no UK publisher. I had read the books in the US editions published by New Directions. The view in London was that he was too difficult; no publisher could take the risk. In response to this, with the literary agent Peter Straus, I set up Tuskar Rock Press, which, using Profile Books as the parent publisher, aims to publish writers who have been overlooked by other UK houses. Once we acquired the rights to Krasznahorkai’s books, the task was to make them better known. At the Edinburgh Book festival in 2011, when he appeared, I saw that we were pushing an open door. The audience contained serious young readers, admirers of Tarr’s films, who were already familiar with these novels. All we had to do was find more of them. In person, Krasznahorkai is thoughtful, almost shy, soft-spoken, unfailingly polite. He is not talkative or outgoing. Thus, when I prepared to interview him at the London Review Bookshop in 2012, I wondered how he would respond to questions about his background and the roots of his inspiration. Not well, is the answer. Or maybe the answer is that there was something wrong with one of the questions. In retrospect, I can see that he did say some interesting things. For example, about his novel Sátántangó: “I had to write only this book and no more. You try to write only one book and put everything you want to say in one book.” Before 1989, he said: “Hungary was an absolutely unreal, crazy country. Abnormal and unbearable. After 1989, it became normal and unbearable.” In what he called “Old Hungary”, there was “very big misery – the mood was unbelievably sad and hopeless”. He was not worried about finding readers. “Most of us need only 10, maybe six on a bad day.” The problem arose when I asked him about God, about what it meant to write a novel that moved beyond the secular, beyond the domestic or the finite, reaching towards some larger space. “Hmmmm,” he said. And then repeated: “Hmmmm.” His comic timing could not have been better. He looked at me mournfully and said: “The question is wonderful, but I couldn’t answer. It’s too difficult for me. I’m not that clever.” It took Szirtes, who joined him on the platform, to deal with the issue: “I know that world more, but it’s a visionary world – a visionary world looking for order. The characters are not looking for God, but looking for their place.” When it came to the time for audience questions, Krasznahorkai seemed relieved. And then he joined his hands together and looked up at the ceiling, half shaman, half shy showman, and as though he were praying for deliverance, he said he was happy to answer questions: “Only I beg you, nothing about God.”