The Nobel Prize lecture is a strange and daunting opportunity for the winner of the prize in literature. The vast majority of the time, winning the Nobel Prize introduces a relatively unknown writer, often one with a small but devoted following, to a much wider audience than they have encountered before in their careers. (Except for Bob Dylan, of course.) Depending on the winner, this could mean some number of readers picking up their books without an understanding of the cultural, historic or specific contexts that shape and drive their work. Literature functions, in part, because readers can have exciting, enlightening and powerful experiences with books, even when they can’t engage with them at every available level. But at the same time, the writers who tend to win Nobel Prizes are often focused on specific genres or styles and are being celebrated for innovating and expanding the possibilities of expression within those specific literary milieus. Regardless of what else a reader might discover, it can be hard to see the reason for the celebration if you’re not familiar with those specific genres or styles.
So the Nobel lecture is a chance for the winner to introduce themselves and their work to that audience, one that has the far-from-guaranteed potential to completely change the course of their careers, and to do so in a way that, as much as possible, sets those readers up for success. As I said, it’s a daunting opportunity.
The 2025 winner, Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, is one of those writers with a small but devoted following. His not winning the prize was something of a running joke on one corner of the literary Internet. His novels are dense, often dreary, concerned with moral failure and social rot. They are emotionally and intellectually intense despite often moving at a glacial pace as the sentences circle and spiral and double back on themselves. Krasznahorkai’s work demands a commitment to the bit, but those who stick with him are rewarded with a subtle sense of humor and some of the most beautiful sentences, images and scenes being written today, both in service to a kind of despite-all-that-I-love-you version of humanism.
So how did Krasznahorkai choose to introduce himself to wider readers in his Nobel lecture, “Enough About Angels”? He keeps it brief (there are sentences in his novels longer than the entire essay) but other than that he doesn’t tone himself down. Quite the opposite, as he has managed to distill just about everything that makes his work significant into the few dozen pages of the essay. It is a truly astonishing achievement, making “Enough About Angels” an excellent introduction to Krasznahorkai’s work while providing depth and surprise to those who already know and study it.
Opening with an image of the author (or perhaps the speaker, one can never be sure), pacing in his writing room, Krasznahorkai is able to include his dark and semiapocalyptic spirituality, the painful and pleasurable cycles of obsession, his distrust of authority and stricture balanced by his awe at the systems of society, all employing his spiraling style.
The final image in the essay starts with a “clochard” or tramp relieving himself on the tracks of a train station, an agonizingly slow process for all involved caused almost certainly by some chronic ailment. (Another example of images and sentence style spiraling into each other.) The image shifts when a police officer sees him from the other side of the tracks and moves to apprehend him. To reach the clochard, however, the cop must go back upstairs into the station and come back down to the other side. Though his business appears to be unfinished, the architecture gives the clochard, even with how slowly his battered body moves, a chance to escape. And that’s where Krasznahorkai concludes the image and this essay; a moment of pursuit, frozen between capture and escape. I suspect that all of his work takes place in this moment of pursuit.
If you’re curious about Krasznahorkai, “Enough About Angels” is a perfect place to start. Rather than trying to create a more accessible version of himself (whatever that could possibly be) Krasznahorkai creates a condensed version of himself. To put this another way, you’ll absolutely know by the end of the essay whether you’re going to connect to his work. (You’ll probably know by the end of the first few pages.) That makes it quite a lot of fun for those of us, myself included, who already read and love his work. So whether you’re curious about Krasznahorkai in particular or Nobel Prize winners, literature in translation or “difficult” literature in general, “Enough About Angels” is a slim book worthing sticking in your pocket.
A version of this story appeared originally on the Porter Square Review of Books. Buy “Enough About Angels: The Nobel Lecture” from Porter Square Books.
