The revelations are sometimes comic, sometimes tragic. The reader has a glimpse, through ‘the dead skin’ that covers everything, of something much more profound about ourselves and the society we live in. Irimiás would be here soon “to shake things up good and proper”….’īells are heard ringing like a premonition, a young girl goes missing, the rain is relentless, the names ‘Irimiás and Petrina’ repeat like a litany while the characters dance drunkenly through the night in the bar. Could an old head like his set itself to anything new? That was how he had thought but no longer: that was all over now. He had resigned himself to staying here for the rest of his life because there was nothing he could do about it.

‘Like the others, no longer believed that anything could change. But all are certain that his coming means that nothing will ever be the same again. For Mrs Halics Irimiás is Satan himself, for others he is a petty crook, devious political operator, or even a Messiah. When someone reports that they have seen Irimiás and Petrina (rumoured to be dead) walking towards the estate in the rain, all their hopes are raised. They are waiting for something to change, for some sign that will tell them where to go or what to do.

The remaining characters – the Halics, the Kráners, the Schmidts, the crippled Futaki, the alcoholic Doctor, Kerekes the drunken farmer, the widowed Mrs Horgos and her four children, are all in a state of perpetual indecision. The story is set on a derelict ‘estate’ where all but a few of the workers have already moved on to other lives.

And he sees himself ‘nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin’. In the opening sequences of both film and novel Futaki, woken by bells, listens to the rain from the warmth of Mrs Schmidt’s bed, and watches the dawn through the ‘mousehole’ of a window that provides a view of the derelict estate that is a product of the collapsing political system. But I found that film and book carried on having a dialogue in my head as I read, and one illuminated the other in a very positive way. Apparently George Szirtes deliberately avoided the film while doing the translation to avoid cross-contamination. I’m a big fan of Béla Tarr (who also filmed one of Krasznahorkai’s later novels The Melancholy of Resistance) and was interested to see how the novel Satantango would relate to the film, but not being a Hungarian speaker, I’ve had to wait until now to find out. Béla Tarr’s 1994 screen translation of Satantango opens with a long-shot of cattle standing indifferently in the rain, up to their hocks in mud, and then – after an almost endless pause – closes in on the human beings who exist under the same sky, soaked by the same rain, immobilised by the same mud.

Sátántangó lászló krasznahorkai