In the darkening embers of a Communist utopia, life in a desolate Hungarian town has come to a virtual standstill. Flies buzz, spiders weave, water drips and animals root desultorily in the barnyard of a collective farm. But when the charismatic Irimias - long-thought dead - returns to the commune, the villagers fall under his spell. The Devil has arrived in their midst.
Irimias will divide and rule: his arrival heralds the beginning of a period of violence and greed for the villagers as he sets about swindling them out of a fortune that might allow them to escape the emptiness and futility of their existence. He soon attains a messianic aura as he plays on the fears of the townsfolk and a series of increasingly brutal events unfold.
Satantango follows thevillagers as they are exploited and taken in by Irimias; as they drink andstumble their way toward the gradual realization of their mistake and ultimatedemise. In its measured prose and long, Tolstoyan sentences, Satantango isnothing short of a literary masterpiece; a formal meditation on death andavarice, human fallibility and faith.
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[One morning near the end of October not long beforethe first drops of the mercilessly long autumn rains began to fall on thecracked and saline soil on the western side of the estate (later the stinkingyellow sea of mud would render footpaths impassable and put the town too beyondreach) Futaki woke to hear bells]***
(TuskarRock, 3 July 2013, first published 1985, paperback, 274 pages, borrowed from mylibrary)
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This is my first time reading the author. Ireally didn't enjoy this one. Satantango is depressing and beak. This isnot necessary a bad thing depending on how the author tackles the subjectmatter. The blurb makes this sound like a dark and intense read. One of theissues I had is the language used; it's very dense and wordy. I really hatethose sorts of books. I read because I want to be transported somewhere elseand spend some time in another world with strangers who become my friends. Iget no pleasure from wading through dense prose I become convinced may suffocateme. There are no paragraph breaks so the chapters, quite long around 30 or 40pages are just one continuous lump of prose diahorrea. Jesus! Give a reader asecond to pause for breath please. The characterisation is poor. I got no senseof who anyone is and didn't give a stuff for them. I need to be invested incharacters even if it's just really wanting the bad guy to be hit by a truckwhile crossing the road. The characters in Satantango are just meh! Oh,and don't get me started on sense of place and time or the lack thereof. Satantango was a complete waste of my time.
