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'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
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.
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
About the author
László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954. He has written 14 novels and won multiple awards including the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2025, the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2019 for Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming, the 2015 Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement and the 2024 Prix Formentor. Several of his most famous novels, including Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance, were turned into films by the director Béla Tarr. His books have been translated into forty-two languages, and his most recent, Herscht 07769, was published in 2024. He lives in the hills of Pilisszentlászló in Hungary.Ottilie Mulzet won the Best Translated Book Award in 2014 for her translation of László Krasznahorkai's Seiobo there Below. She has also translated the work of Szilárd Borbély, Gábor Schein, and György Dragomán.
Summary
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2019: The defining master-work of the Man Booker International winner's spectacular career, now in paperback
Foreword
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2019: The defining master-work of the Man Booker International winner's spectacular career, now in paperback
Report
Hungarian maestro László Krasznahorkai is laconic and shrewd, as practical as he is existential, capable of wresting huge laughs as well as immense profundity from the commonplace and the way in which we choose to respond to it. Irish Times
