Author(s): Laszlo Krasznahorkai (translated by Ottilie Mulzet)

Novel | Hungary | Translated fiction

Hailed internationally as perhaps the most important novel of the young twenty-first century, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming is the culmination of László Krasznahorkai's remarkable and singular career.
'Baron Wenkcheim's Homecoming is a fitting capstone to Krasznahorkai's tetralogy, one of the supreme achievements of contemporary literature. Now seems as good a time as any to name him among our greatest living novelists.' --Paris Review

Nearing the end of his life, Baron Bela Wenckheim decides to return to the provincial Hungarian town of his birth. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he wishes to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart Marika. What follows is an endless storm of gossip, con men and local politicians, vividly evoking the small town's alternately drab and absurd existence. Spectacular actions are staged, death and the abyss loom, until finally doom is brought down on the unsuspecting residents of the town.

'I've said a thousand times that I always wanted to write just one book. Now, with this novel, I can prove that I really wrote just one book in my life. This is the book - Satantango, Melancholy, War & War, and Baron. This is my one book.' - László Krasnahorkai

REVIEW: 'Mesmerisingly strange ... this blackly absurd satire of provincial Hungarian life is maddening, compelling - and very funny ... exhilaratingly out of step with most contemporary fiction' - Guardian
'Baron is not bedtime reading: you need your wits about you ... This is a novel that demands much of its readers, and gives much in return. In an era glutted with fiction as vapid and insubstantial as a Krispy Kreme doughnut, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming is the real Linzer torte.' - The New Statesman
'A mantra of fret, a strangely uplifting pessimism ... the Hungarian master has created perhaps his most accessible novel' - Prospect

Author Biography: Laszlo Krasznahorkai is the author of five novels, including Satantango and Seiobo There Below, which won Best Translated Book Award in Fiction in consecutive years, and The Melancholy of Resistance, which won the 1993 Best Book of the Year Award in Germany. He was awarded the Man Booker International Prize in 2015, and his books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in the hills of Pilisszentlaszlo in Hungary.