Sátántangó by László Krasznahorkai: review In 1994, the director Béla Tarr released a film - seven hours long - called Sátántangó. Hailed as a cinematic masterpiece, the writer Susan Sontag said: "I'd be glad to see it every year for the rest of my life." Now, for the first time, the novel that inspired it is being published in English. Originally written in 1985 by the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, it's translated by the poet George Szirtes and offers a bleak, yet darkly comic, vision of a collective farm limping through the dying days of communism. Drenched by merciless autumn rain and infested by spiders, the buildings are rotting and the villagers, paralysed with misery, are waiting "belly to the ground, like cats at pig-killing time, hoping for scraps" for their chance to escape the farm. When news reaches them that Irimiás, a former resident whom they had believed to be dead, has apparently been resurrected, they begin to hope for some form of salvation for themselves. Krasznahorkai presents an apocalyptic landscape where each raindrop is "a sure messenger of doom" and in the book's 12 chapters, most composed of a single paragraph, there are few moments of respite from the hellfire of his prose. Just as the denizens of this purgatory fling themselves from partner to partner dancing the tango in their local bar while awaiting Irimiás's arrival, we are hurtled between various characters" points of view (two of which, the doctor and Esti, are so deeply unsettling as to be completely unforgettable). Presented with "ever newer and newer versions of the story," we know, all the while, that, as Irimiás says, this is a book in which "the imagination never stops working but we're not one jot nearer the truth." Sátántangó melds together elements of carnival, religion, black comedy, Hungarian politics and folklore into an open-ended allegory about the nature of storytelling itself: it is about the stories we tell ourselves in order to live and those we tell others in order to control them; about the narratives from which reality is constructed and the limits to which they can be pushed. Intoxicating and exhilarating, bleak yet beautiful, Sátántangó is a modern masterpiece that manages to speak both of its time and to transcend it altogether. Sátántangó László Krasznahorkai Atlantic, £12.99, 274pp