He is Futaki, in bed with the wife of his neighbour and associate. The man who hears those bells is lame, and hobbles about with the aid of a stick. I notice Chapter 2 is subtitled ‘We are resurrected,’ and whatever kind of news this is, it isn’t good. The novel opens with the threatening boom of impossibly close-up bells – no such bells exist – and two men whose deaths were reported eighteen months ago have now apparently been seen alive. Are we in Krasznahorkai’s native Hungary? Somewhere else, perhaps a rusting, post-industrial dystopia of his imagination? And what about those hints of the supernatural? ‘Satantango’ implies something other-worldly, and not in a good way. I won’t stop after every chapter, but just this once I will – because after twenty pages full of incident, we still know almost nothing.
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