I HAVE OWNED this for years, maybe ten, but I only started it last August. I was only a hundred pages in or so when I saw the announcement that Krasznahorkai had won the Nobel. The sweet part of that was my being able honestly to answer "yes" when asked whether I had read anything by him.
A magnificent novel, I would say. It took me a few months to read, however. It is not long (just 314 pages in the New Directions paperback I read), although it is dense (some paragraphs are a few pages long), but I found myself needing to takes some weeks-long breaks from it because it is terrifying. It probably did not help that I tended to be reading it between 11:00 p.m. and one o'clock in the morning.
The Melancholy of Resistance is not a thriller nor a horror novel. The terror lies in the novel's depiction of a crypto-fascist authoritarian seizing control of a modest-sized city in Hungary, and the not-at-all-distant similarities between what is happening in this fictional town and what is happening in the U.S.A. right now.
Krasznahorkai's portrait of the seizure of power does not seem historically specific; no dates are mentioned, nor is the Arrow Cross or Ferenc Szálasi. We are definitely in Hungary and might be in the 1930s or 1940s, although there are no references to historical events that might pin the story down (much as The Trial seems set in Prague before the outbreak of World War I, but we get no certain indications that it is). Krasznahorkai seems to be about drawing archetypes rather than writing historical fiction.
The key archetype is Mrs. Eszter, whose attributes coincide frequently with those of President Trump and his team: a sense that her will is a law unto itself, a willingness to exploit common fears and resentments to gain power, the whipping up of hatred against outsiders, the promptness in erecting Horst Wessel-like "martyrs," a readiness to resort to violence. No armbands, banners, or slogans, but the psychological architecture of right-wing authoritarianism is all there.
The novel takes place over just a couple of days, but in that brief time Mrs. Eszter stages a kind of coup, helped at first by the police chief (who turns out to be an unreliable drunk) then by a state official making a visit, somehow collecting the reins of power into her hands. The opportunity she is looking for arrives in the form of a traveling company with an unusual exhibit, a preserved whale (Leviathan?), a departure from the familiar that she uses to provoke the town's suspicion of outsiders and fear of the unknown to the point of violence.
Can anyone stop her? Perhaps her estranged husband, Mr. Eszter, person of letters and musicologist (he is particularly interested in the keyboard tuning systems of Andreas Werckmeister--as with the possible allusion to Hobbes's Leviathan, there may be thematic implications here). But Mr. Eszter can't get it together, quite, can't protect his eccentric friend Valuska or the town from Mrs. Eszter's machinations. He succumbs to the idea "that there was one law and one law only, that of the strong which dictated that 'the stronger power was absolute'." Shades of Stephen Miller! The town "cannot be governed in the old way anymore!" insists Mrs. Eszter, and it turns out she knows exactly what the new way should like. Shades of Miller again, not to mention the whole administration to which he belongs.
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