The Last Wolf & Herman

by László Krasznahorkai, John Batki (Translator), George Szirtes (Translator)

Overview

Now in paperback, two novellas from the Hungarian master László Krasznahorkai—“one of the most mysterious artists now at work” (Colm Toíbín) 

The Last Wolf (translated by George Szirtes) is Krasznahorkai in a maddening nutshell—it features a classic obsessed narrator, a man hired (by mistake) to write the true tale of the last wolf in Spain. This miserable experience (being mistaken for another person, dragged about a cold foreign place, and appalled by a species’s end) is narrated—all in a single sentence—as a sad looping tale, a howl more or less, in a dreary Berlin bar to a patently bored bartender.

Herman (translated by John Batki), “a peerless virtuoso of trapping who guards the splendid mysteries of an ancient craft gradually sinking into permanent oblivion,” is asked to clear a forest’s last “noxious beasts.” He begins with great zeal, although in time he “suspects that maybe he was ‘on the wrong scent.’” Herman switches sides, deciding to track entirely new game …

 

 

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811229050
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	12/17/2019
Edition description:	Translatio
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	1,206,814
Product dimensions:	7.20(w) x 4.50(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

The winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature and the 2015 Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement, László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary.

John Batki is a kilimologist, writer, translator, and visual artist. He was born in Hungary and has lived in the United States since age fourteen.

George Szirtes (b. 1948) is an award-winning poet and translator who settled in England after his family fled the Hungarian Uprising of 1956.

Editorial Reviews

"Together, ‘The Last Wolf’ and ‘Herman’ raise a set of spiritual questions that affirms their author as one of the most important — and eccentric — writers working today."

Hari Kunzru - The Spectator

"Gateway drugs to Krasznahorkai’s work: As the very best fiction always does, they bring another world—an alien world, let’s say—into our own."

Christine Smallwood - Harper’s

"Krasznahorkai, poet of the Apocalypse, stands alone relentlessly, if gleefully, offering wonders."

The Economist

There are three stages of reading Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s The Last Wolf, a 76-page, one-sentence-long novel: disbelief, panic and exhilaration.

Nicole Lamy - The New York Times

Wild and wonderful.

Adam Thirlwell - The Guardian

Krasznahorkai’s method is to examine reality “to the point of madness” and he does so with majestic style and black comedy.

Luke Brown - Financial Times

Krasznahorkai shows himself to be a writer of immense talent, capable of creating stories that are both unforgettably visceral and beautiful on the page.

Claire Kohda Hazelton - The Guardian

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.

Eileen Battersby - The Irish Times

Slow, relentless forces permeate the world of László Krasznahorkai; his characters are subject to glacial currents that bear them ever onwards, an inch at a time, toward a horizon they constantly imagine but never actually behold. In so doing, they cry, or laugh, or cry laughing, or carry out the timeworn repetitions that make a life, until the moment they come up against the horizon.

Camille Gajewski - Music & Literature

László Krasznahorkai is a visionary writer of extraordinary intensity and vocal range who captures the texture of present-day existence in scenes that are terrifying, strange, appallingly comic, and often shatteringly beautiful: magnificent works of deep imagination and complex passions, in which the human comedy verges painfully onto transcendence.

Marina Warner - Announcing the 2015 Man Booker International Prize

Don’t underestimate the pair; they might look flimsy enough to finish during a long commute but they’ll haunt you—or perhaps hunt you—long after the final full-stop has been left behind.

Electric Literature

One of the most profoundly unsettling experiences I have had as a reader.

James Wood - The New Yorker

Krasznahorkai is alone among European novelists now in his intensity and originality. One of the most mysterious artists now at work.

Colm Tóibín

Rather than the stoic asceticism of Kafka's longer stories, these are absurd as they are thrilling, with the richest possible representation of figures backing themselves into corners and staying there, of contemplating the self as absurd.

Sydney Morning Herald

2016-06-22
Two short but maddeningly complex fictions by the Hungarian master (Seiobo There Below, 2013, etc.) of the postmodern.Open Krasznahorkai's latest in English, and you're likely to feel a little lightheaded: giddy if you're a fan of Lem as filtered through Danielewski, merely headachy if not. The Last Wolf concerns a Hungarian writer who, sitting in a bar among multilingual topers and a bored barkeep, recounts the unlikely twists of fate that led to a gig recording the true events surrounding the killing of the last wolf in the Spanish province of Extremadura. Why him and not a local? Who pulled the trigger? Did the wolf really die? It's a shaggy dog of a yarn, told in an unrushing style without the benefit of a single period until the very end: "he even boasted of seeing the wolf—yes, I saw it, the wolf, he repeated—the only trouble being that they wanted to see the actual place because Felix was away, Felix? yes Felix, the gamekeeper next door, and he was about to embark on further details of the hunt when a rusty old car screamed to a halt in front of them, as he told the barman at the Sparschwein…." Fans of Oulipo-style experimentation will marvel at the pyrotechnics. Herman, which the publisher labels "a novella in two parts," concerns a game warden, "surrounded by stuffed birds, dilapidated furniture, and antlers mounted on the wall," who, alarmed at an apparent increase in predatory activity out in the dark woods beyond town, goes to war with nature. Though fueled, Krasznahorkai writes, by "elemental compassion," it would seem that his war spills over into civilization, for the second section—mercifully with periods—concerns the hunt the townspeople mount for the hunter himself. Suffice it to say that the story doesn't end happily—and that, for all the narrative tricks, Krasznahorkai makes plain who the real predators in the world are. Somewhere James Joyce is smiling. Krasznahorkai is a writer who, though difficult, demands greater recognition by readers outside Hungary.

Kirkus Reviews

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