![]() ![]() The locals excitedly assemble in the spider-infested bar to await him, where they argue, drink and dance grotesquely to the accordion into the small hours. At the end of the first chapter, they learn that Irimias, a man whom they credit with extraordinary powers, and who was supposed to have died, is on the road to the estate, with his sidekick Petrina. It is inhabited by a cast of semi-crazed inadequates: desperate peasants cack-handedly trying to rip each other off while ogling each other's wives a "perpetually drunk" doctor obsessively watching his neighbours young women trying to sell themselves in a ruined mill a disabled girl ineptly attempting to kill her cat. This is the "estate", apparently some sort of failed collective, where all hope has been lost and all the buildings are falling down. ![]() ![]() The action centres on the arrival of a man who may or may not be a prophet, or the devil, or just a violent con-man, in a rotting, rain-drenched Hungarian hamlet. It is brutal, relentless and so amazingly bleak that it's often quite funny. Satantango, first published in Hungary in 1985 and now regarded as a classic, is a monster of a novel: compact, cleverly constructed, often exhilarating, and possessed of a distinctive, compelling vision – but a monster nevertheless. ![]()
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