Translated into English by Ottilie Mulzet

WINNER of the 2022 Libri Prize in Hungary

Herscht 07769: that's the postal address on the envelope of the letters sent to Angela Merkel by a man who says that the matter is confidential.

The gentle giant Florian Herscht has a problem: having faithfully attended Herr Köhler’s adult education classes in physics, he is convinced that disaster is imminent. And so he embarks upon a one-sided correspondence with Chancellor Angela Merkel, to convince her of the danger of the complete destruction of all physical matter. Florian works for the Boss (the head of a local neo-Nazi gang), who has taken him under his wing and gotten him work as a graffiti cleaner in the small eastern German town of Kana. The Boss is enraged by a graffiti artist who is defacing the various monuments to Johann Sebastian Bach in Thuringia with wolf emblems. A Bach fanatic and director of an amateur orchestra, the Boss is determined to catch the culprit with the help of his gang. Florian has no choice but to join the chase. Havoc ensues when real wolves are sighted in the area . . .

Written in one cascading sentence with the power of atomic particles colliding, Krasznahorkai’s novel is a tour de force, a morality play, a blistering satire, a hilarious and devastating encapsulation of our helplessness at the moral and environmental dilemmas we face today.

‘Propulsive and revelatory … the central driver of suspense remains the author’s aesthetic gamble, restricting himself across 400 pages to a single full stop. Is Krasznahorkai using style to convey something that the story alone can’t? And will he pull it off? Having persisted to the final period, I am happy to report that he is, and does. (…) In the abstract, his artistry may sound forbidding to all but the most devoted lovers of the European art novel. In concrete terms, though, Krasznahorkai’s work offers, to a degree rare in contemporary life, one of the central pleasures of fiction: an encounter with the otherness of other people. He’s a universalist cut loose from the shibboleths of humanism’

- New York Times

'In a long book with only one terminal punctuation mark, not easy to read but graced by a certain poetry, Krasznahorkai allegorizes globalism and nationalism, gets in digs at complacent burgers and ardent environmentalists, and illustrates, through Florian and other characters, how thinly the veneer of civilization lies atop a thick crust of savagery. Brilliant, like all Krasznahorkai's books.'

- Kirkus

‘Magnificent single-sentence opus from Hungarian postmodernist Krasznahorkai (…) "Apocalypse is the natural state of life,” Florian writes to Merkel, a line that doubles as an artist statement for this brilliantly cacophonous novel, which conveys the sense that the end is already here, and that the trappings of civilization are easier to scrape away than paint from stone. This stands with Krasznahorkai’s best work’

– Publishers Weekly

‘Bach, wolves and fascists – a genius novelist strikes again. Written in a single 400-page sentence, Herscht 07769 is many things: a despairing fable of human ineffacy, a soulful appreciation of Bach and a deeply felt portrayal of a small community. It is a work of genius, astonishingly well translated by Ottilie Mulzet: I can only imagine the labour and dedication involved in capturing the rhythms of Krasznahorkai’s clauses, their strange and captivating music (…) it feels somehow biblical while simultaneously capturing the rhythms of casual hearsay.’

– The Telegraph

‘The bleakness of the worldview is often undercut by the eccentricities of the prophets who deliver it, allowing it to be read in a comic manner, the same way we might smile at a gloomy statement by Beckett or Kafka, perhaps as a form of defence against a threatening truth.(…) When the townsfolk also start to foresee catastrophes- some political, some ecological -the resonance is powerful. The fact that the far-right AfD party recently won the most votes in Thuringia’s state elections only adds to the impact of the novel’s political concern’

– Times Literary Supplement

‘This books immediately sucks you in like a black hole, this book is like the particle accelerator that Herscht is so afraid of: you laugh and you are amazed and you tremble. Neo-nazis, giants and avengers and Bach cantatas; the East, the West and the world. An unbelievable satan tango!’

– Clemens Meyer

‘With a style that plunges you into the deepest literary concentration from the very first line, the characters and East Thuringia appear as if by themselves. It is a long time since I last felt as fond of a protagonist as I did with Florian Herscht. You can’t stop reading this book. I say it without any jealousy: László Krasznahorkai has written the German novel of our times’

– Ingo Schulze

'A work of great linguistic virtuosity with which László Krasznahorkai has once again proven his status as one of the most independent and complex European writers’

- Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany)

‘Krasznahorkai’s book is not only a very contemporary ghost story, but it is also a great comedy about Germany (…) What an amazing novel’

- Die Zeit (Germany)

'… Krasznahorkai is a contemporary author who joins the ranks of the classics. (…) I don't know a single word of Hungarian, but my trust in Ove Lund, who has translated two of the other three Krasznahorkai novels available in Norwegian, is immeasurably great: There is a huge range in this language, and Lund extends that with unmistakable style, in an energetic and thoughtful Norwegian where laughter and terror lurk everywhere between the words.'

– Klassekampen (Norway)

‘A triumph of storytelling: Herscht 07769 may well be a turning point for the author, a broader narrative, a more straightforward approach and a more unvarnished compassion for the characters. It is a joy to read’

- Dagens Nyheter (Sweden)