The Melancholy of Resistance

The Melancholy of Resistance unfolds in a provincial Hungarian town where the arrival of a traveling circus, whose main attraction is the stuffed body of the world's largest whale, sets off a slow, terrifying unraveling of civic order. Rumors spread, paranoia festers, and a demagogic agitator exploits the town's anxiety until violence becomes inevitable. Krasznahorkai writes in sentences of extraordinary length and density, paragraphs that spiral inward while the world they describe spirals outward into chaos. Susan Sontag called him "the Hungarian master of apocalypse," and the novel earns the description. Adapted by Béla Tarr into the celebrated 2000 film Werckmeister Harmonies. Krasznahorkai received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2025. The First American edition, and first hardcover, was published by New Directions, translated by George Szirtes. It was preceded by the British paperback edition.

Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, bound in pictorial wrappers. New York: New Directions, 2000. Nobel Prize winner (2025). ISBN: 9780811214506. #11402.
Near fine in dust jacket.