English Podcast starts at 00:00:00
Bengali Podcast Starts at 00:26:04
Hindi Podcast Starts at 00:44:39
Hungarian Podcast Starts at 01:00:39
Reference
László Krasznahorkai (Paperback – 1 June 2002), The Melancholy of Resistance. Paperback Edition. New Directions Publishing.
ebook and Hardcover available at
https://www.ndbooks.com/book/the-melancholy-of-resistance/
László Krasznahorkai | Nobel Prize in Literature 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0svt8kSBL4
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🎙️ Welcome back, my friends, to Revise and Resubmit! 📚 This is your Weekend Book Review episode, and today we’re diving deep into a literary beast that swallows you whole and then spits you out in another world entirely.
Today’s pick? The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai — a book that first appeared in Hungarian back in 1989 before making its way into English in 2002, thanks to the gifted translator George Szirtes. 🐳 And yes, there’s a whale involved. But oh, my friends, it’s no ordinary whale.
Krasznahorkai, born in Hungary in 1954, is a novelist whose works are as challenging as they are rewarding — the kind of prose that makes you feel both lost at sea and tethered to something deep and ancient. This man isn’t just an author; he’s a literary architect of chaos and beauty. In 2025, he snagged the Nobel Prize in Literature for weaving worlds where apocalyptic terror dances with the redemptive light of art. 🌌
In The Melancholy of Resistance, a circus rolls into a freezing Hungarian town, promising the world’s largest stuffed whale. But behind the flimsy curtain of spectacle, rumors begin to swirl. The result? A slow unraveling — of order, of trust, of sanity itself — with unforgettable characters: Mrs. Eszter, scheming her rise; Mr. Eszter, retreating into music; and dear Valuska, the dreamer who somehow holds the tangled threads of humanity together. 🎭
George Szirtes once called the novel “a slow lava flow of narrative” — and that’s exactly how it feels. The Guardian spoke of its “lunar leaps and bounds,” an impossible dance between density and weightlessness. Reading this book isn’t passive; it’s an experience, a strange winter journey in which you can almost taste the frost and hear the crackling murmurs of the crowd in the circus tent. ❄️🎪
So here’s my question to you… if the whale at the center of the circus is just a stuffed shell, what’s the real creature haunting this town’s heart? 🐳👀
🙏 A huge thanks to László Krasznahorkai and to the publishers — Magvető for the original Hungarian edition and New Directions Publishing for bringing it to the English-speaking world.
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