Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai has been chosen as the winner “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”
October 9, 2025
"László Krasznahorkai has won the Nobel prize in literature."
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42 comments:
After this latest peace deal with Hamas, if Trump doesn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize they might as well close up shop.
Is that OUR Laslo?
I feel like just about every year László Krasznahorkai wins the Nobel prize in literature.
In other news, Laslo Spatula has won the Nobel Prize for Althouse blog commenting, “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of an unrelenting news cycle, reaffirms the power of laughter.”
And every year it's somebody winning for a compelling vision of the power of art in the midst of apocalyptic terror. It's always so deep, dark, and gloomy.
He's an opponent of Orban. This is a reactionary award.
This is a reactionary award.
It’s 2025. The word is performative.
Althouse @6;23am,
What would you expect coming from a nation of genuine Scandinavian pessimists?
Yes I don’t get the obsession with the apocalypse. I thought they were just trying to hard sell the climate change scams…
Laslo!!! We all know!!!! Winner!!!!!!Love ya, Laslo!!!!
He is László
Dystopia sells because unless you live in the US, the world is always shitting on you. My son has been dating a Uber successful tech industry woman from Switzerland for the past year or so. She claims that the US dominance is because of our optimism and confidence, we believe we can adapt and overcome any and all obstacles.
Is that OUR Laslo?
I always knew Commenters here were good. Just not Nobel Laureate good.
And the least pronounceable name.
"Least pronounceable"? Just like it's spelled:
"Kraszna-horkai".
Dystopia sells because unless you live in the US, the world is always shitting on you. My son has been dating a Uber successful tech industry woman from Switzerland
Holy carp- the world is shits you in Switzerland??
I get the impression this Guardian writer is covertly explaining why he or she didn’t finish reading “this famously unparagraphed novel.”
“Starting to read this famously unparagraphed novel is like entering a labyrinth: a claustrophobic zone where the mystery of an arriving leviathan (and all that symbolises), of the suffocating small town into which it arrives, not to mention the nocturne which is the setting, all combined almost unbearably in a portrait of powerlessness and society’s failure.”
It must be the guilt for not standing for anything other than your own comfort and security.
"Kraszna-horkai". Gesundheit!
"In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock".
They lost me at oeuvre.
I have to wonder if his writing is that good, or his stories are that good, or people just want to be able to say they've read his book, which was one long, run-on sentence, and "man...aren't I smarter for that?"
Well...hell. I'm going to go back and rework this story I've been working on for...oh...70 or so years and eliminate the periods. I'm pretty good at run-on sentences already and those darn periods just get in my way. I sometimes lose my train of thought when I hit that period. It's like..."Wait...where was I?".
And this world could certainly use more semi-colons.
Sparklefarts and the Bitter One win Grammys for narrating their audio books. Yawn.
William Gaddis had a similar style.
László Krasznahorkai ...
It's like a name out of Superman Bizarro World.
I read the NYT write up of his work. He wrote on four hundred pages novel that has only one period. I'd rather watch a dog walk on his hind legs than read such a novel. I wonder how much of a bump his sales will get after winning this prize....I asked Chatgpt who is the most obscure Nobel lit prize winner. There's quite a long list. I'd give the nod to Frans Eemil Sillanpaa. He's a Finnish novelist who won in 1939. Nobody took the trouble to translate him........I have actually read a book by Pearl S. Buck. I thought it was pretty good. She's the prize winner whose rep has suffered the most downward revision. On the plus side, her books are sufficiently read to cause her to suffer a downward revision.
The Nobel people were ahead of the trend. Long before the Hollywood people gave out Oscars to movies no one wanted to see, they were handing out Nobel lit prizes to authors no one wanted to read.
His novel The Melancholy of Resistance may well be captivatingly written— meant, I think, as a Milan Kundera-esque chronicle of oppression behind the iron curtain. But Krasnahorkai’s dystopia is a thinly veiled current day Hungary under Victor Orban, the great satan whose citizens are experiencing none of the pathologies overtaking his European neighbours who so virtuously admitted millions of Muslim immigrants who hate them and want to sexually subjugate their women. Conservative author Rod Dreher, who lives in Hungary, describes it as “America in the fifties.” No LGBT propaganda, women feel safe walking the city at night, lots of families and communities about. Oh— and this author has expressed suitable horror of Trump to make his selection sit well with the bien-pensants of the Davos crowd.
Kamala will win the Nobel for her memoir before Trump ever wins a peace prize. He, and we, should just stop talking about it. He, and we, are counter cultural, and shouldn’t expect it.
Mildly disappointing when they get my name wrong like that.
However, the latest issue of “The Phantom of the Movies’ Videoscope” has a four-star review of my latest film.
From the review:
“As a jazzy score percolates, a sonorous vice tells us a Humphrey Bogart died October 2, 1959. It's "sun-kissed L.A.," a place where "people are made expendable every day," and we float on the jazz notes, transported on the clips of '50s street scenes into an hypnotic Maltese Falcon-like illustrated audio book learning of the real Bogart who died January 14, 1957 and immersed in the tale of yet a third shadowy Bogie… …”The Three Humphreys”, one of Stancik's finest, is a marvelous tongue-in-check exposé of conspiracy theories wrapped in conspiracy theories. It's funny, rapier smart, and cuts to the bone.”
Lots of wonderful 1940s and 1950s stock footage, no vulgarities AND music numbers. For those who love the noir films of that era you might be surprised how much you will like this one:
https://www.laslofilms.com/the-three-humphreys
I am Laslo.
The second i saw his name , I thought "He's a not a woman, black, brown, or asian. He's from Hungary, why did they give it him? Oh wait, he must be Jewish". So, I go to Google type in his and "jewish" and Bingo!
Lets see Pinter - Jewish, Dylan - jewish, Whosit - who got the Poetry award - Jewish. The trend continues.
He hates orban the designated hate object like the french abortion fangirl who loves terrorists
Jewish Hungarians have been so smart that they were even referred to as Martians a new race from another world. People like von Neumann, Wigner, Teller, von Kármán, Gabor, Polanyi, Erdős, Pólya among others. Many did work at Los Alamos, and they were probably the smartest people in the world, all from a small country.
There was another prize winner who had orban derangement
Krasznahorkai? WHODAT???
The Nobel Prize committee probably wishes that it could revoke the prize given to Ivo Andric, the winner in 1961. His work dealt mainly with live in Bosnia under the Ottomans (according to Wikipedia). I have read his novel Bridge on the Drina and I can highly recommend it.
"And every year it's somebody winning for a compelling vision of the power of art in the midst of apocalyptic terror. It's always so deep, dark, and gloomy."
Pretty much, yes.
"I have read his novel Bridge on the Drina and I can highly recommend it." - Ditto. Not apocalyptic. The tone is... wry nostalgia?
A well deserved one, and also an inspiration for great movie director Bela Tarr.
Good to see the Nobel academy giving its prize on purely writing grounds, and not political ones.
Satantango is where I started and it's perfect — short and brilliant.
I hereby announce sanctions of 100% on Norway or Sweden or whichever country does these things. The fake committee cannot appreciate the true literary talent of my tweets. Sad.
Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Krasznahorkai translates roughly to “ponytail swish”.
Here's a third recommendation of Bridge on the Drina
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