Letter from a Reader 10.9.25

A Nobel for the land of my forebears and why you might want to read Magda Szabó, “Hungary’s Jane Austen,” instead of winner László Krasznahorkai

László Krasznahorkai/ nobelprize.org

Hungarian sounds “like something falling down stairs,” the New York Times correspondent R.W. Apple once wrote. It’s a common jab that tends to infuriate those of us who grew amid speakers of the language.

Like so many children of immigrants of his generation, my father learned English only after he began school. Until then he spoke his parents’ Hungarian, and I heard it throughout my youth from my grandmother, with whom I lived during our summers at the Jersey Shore.

In all those years, I never saw the language as “harsh” or “eccentric,” terms I’ve since heard others apply to it. And I suspect we’ll be hearing them more now that the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai has won the 2025 Nobel Prize in literature.

Krasznahorkai isn’t obscure—he was a bookies’ favorite as the news drew near—but I’ve avoided his work precisely because critics have tended to describe it in the terms often used to libel his language, such as “difficult” and “demanding.” His most recent novel to reach the U.S., Herscht 07769, consists of one long sentence with no paragraph breaks and just one period.

I’m not put off by “difficult” and “demanding.” In my experience books people avoid for fear that they will be daunting, such as Middlemarch and War and Peace, tell such great stories that they’re less taxing than, say, a new novel by the Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown and his bizarre conspiracies and even less plausible English.

But no one should conflate the challenges of an author’s works with that of the author’s native language, which may have no relation. That could happen with Krasznahorkai when people have characterized both the same way.