László Krasznahorkai on Failure, Velocity, and the New Angels

In a wide-ranging interview at the Athens International Literature Festival, Hungarian novelist and 2025 Nobel laureate László Krasznahorkai discusses his creative process, his obsession with failure, and his evolving prose style. He explains that his long, complex sentences are an attempt to capture the velocity of spoken language, particularly what he calls 'explosive confession.' Krasznahorkai describes his books as a sequence of failures, each one an attempt to remedy the rhythmic and melodic errors of the previous. He reflects on the human relationship to beauty, arguing that modern technical civilization has severed the connection to the divine that once made beauty accessible. He introduces the concept of 'new angels'—beings who walk among us with no message, waiting for us to send them one—and distinguishes between rebellion against a part (concrete oppression) and rebellion against the whole (despair at the entire human condition). The interview was translated by Ottilie Mulzet.