Wani Nazir takes us behind War & War by László Krasznahorkai as he analyses his Nobel Prize win for this book.
When László Krasznahorkai won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2025, it felt more like a discovery than just a recognition of his earlier work. The Nobel committee praised his “apocalyptic intensity and visionary form” and said his work has “compelling and visionary oeuvre.” This Hungarian novelist stood out not only because of how he wrote or the long, complicated sentences he used. He also wrote about the basic terror of being human in a world that seemed to be falling apart.
War & War (1999) is probably his most disturbing and thought-provoking book. It’s hard to see the fight between what things mean and how useless they could seem, between wanting order and dealing with chaos, and between wanting something better and living with deterioration. The reader grows exhausted after each line, as if they are continually looking for a truth that is just out of grasp. Krasznahorkai doesn’t just write; he seems to be in a war. The reader knows the most important problem of our time: how to use language to salvage a world that is coming apart.