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Published Sep 2019
576 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
At last, the capstone to Krasznahorkai's four-part masterwork. Winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature.
Set in contemporary times, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming tells the story of a Prince Myshkin–like figure, Baron Béla Wenckheim, who returns at the end of his life to his provincial Hungarian hometown. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he longs to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart Marika. Confusions abound, and what follows is an endless storm of gossip, con men, and local politicians, vividly evoking the small town's alternately drab and absurd existence. All along, the Professor―a world-famous natural scientist who studies mosses and inhabits a bizarre Zen-like shack in a desolate area outside of town―offers long rants and disquisitions on his attempts to immunize himself from thought. Spectacular actions are staged as death and the abyss loom over the unsuspecting townfolk.
National Book Awards, 2019
"Krasznahorkai establishes his own rules and rides a wave of exhilarating energy in this sprawling, nonpareil novel...Apocalyptic, visionary, and mad, it flies off the page and stays lodged intractably wherever it lands." - Publishers Weekly
"The baron cuts a memorable figure, but the real star of Krasznahorkai's story is a philosopher who has cut himself off from society and lives in hermitage in a forest park, concerned with problems of being and nonbeing. In the end, the worlds the philosopher, the baron, and other characters inhabit are slated to disappear in a wall of flame." - Kirkus
"A master of peripatetic, never-ending sentences that brim over with vacillations, qualifications, and false epiphanies." - Hudson Review
"If you're a fan of Krasznahorkai, you already know that you need to read this one: the final volume in his four-part series, in which the aging Baron Bela Wenckheim proceeds home to Hungary, to the highly absurd town of his birth." - LitHub
"A vision of painstaking beauty." - NPR
"Baron Wenkcheim's Homecoming is a fitting capstone to Krasznahorkai's tetralogy, one of the supreme achievements of contemporary literature." - Paris Review Daily
"Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming is his latest, longest, strangest, and possibly greatest novel―suffused with nihilism, but deeply funny. The absurd is more absurd, the incomprehensible more incomprehensible than ever. And yet, though it has its confrontations with despair and nihilism, Wenckheim is the funniest of Krasznahorkai's novels." - The Baffler
"[Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming] is precisely the novel we need in these difficult, foreboding times. His funniest and most profound book and, quite possibly, also his most accessible." - The Millions
This information about Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
The winner of the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement, László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary.
Ottilie Mulzet is a literary critic and translator of Hungarian. Mulzet received the Best Translated Book Award in 2014 for her translation of Krasznahorkai's Seiobo There Below.
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