The trapper and the trapped

The Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai has only lately become known to Anglophone audiences, through the masterly translations of George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet. Work written and published in the 1980s, during the corrupt and cynical last days of so-called ‘goulash communism’ under János Kádár, began to circulate in English in the early 2000s. In Sátántangó, War and War and The Melancholy of Resistance, readers were introduced to nightmarish, purgatorial worlds shot through with millennarian anxiety and a hopeless mystical yearning for the divine. Then, in 2013, the massive novel — or perhaps more accurately a cloud of novellas — Seiobo There Below (published in Hungarian in 2008) revealed a writer who had spent a decade travelling in China and Japan, and whose engagement with Buddhism had transformed a sensibility formed by Kafka, Christian eschatology and central European Absurdism. Now, after the award of the 2015 Man Booker International prize, which cemented his reputation, comes a pair of novellas, ‘The Last Wolf’ and ‘Herman’, one recent and one from the 1980s, both dealing with hunting and the relationship between humans and the animal world.