Satanic Tango

The Nobel Prize for Literature winner's seminal novel of doom, emptiness and hopelessness

The Satanic Tango suggestively draws us into the gloomy, rainy atmosphere of the Hungarian hermitage as a social reality. Here the reader encounters a vision of universal destruction that connects the current and the timeless. A double order of things is intertwined here: constant extinction and the attempt to capture and describe this process statically. Things often appear to us to be ethereally irrational, only to be retrospectively shown to be earthly rational.
Even after forty years, the novel has not lost its relevance: questions of human dignity, freedom, or poverty, addictions, the possibility of breaking free and escaping is one of the main ones, with which the novel's characters are confronted in a world of metaphysical ordinariness and visionary realism.
The motto from Kafka's Castle recalls the pervasive absurdity and despair, but also irony and exaggeration. The plot and structure of the novel unfold in the rhythm of the tango, in a circle, the end of the novel brings us back to the beginning. Is there really no escape?