Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2019

'Baron Wenkcheim's Homecoming is a fitting capstone to Krasznahorkai's tetralogy, one of the supreme achievements of contemporary literature. Now seems as good a time as any to name him among our greatest living novelists.' Paris Review

Nearing the end of his life, Baron Bela Wenckheim decides to return to the provincial Hungarian town of his birth. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he wishes to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart Marika. What follows is an endless storm of gossip, con men and local politicians, vividly evoking the small town's alternately drab and absurd existence.

Meanwhile, the Professor - a world-famous natural scientist who studies mosses and inhabits a bizarre Zen-like shack in a desolate area outside of town - offers long rants and disquisitions on his own attempts to immunise himself from thought. Spectacular actions are staged, death and the abyss loom, until finally doom is brought down on the unsuspecting residents of the town.

Hailed internationally as perhaps the most important novel of the young twenty-first century, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming is the culmination of Laszlo Krasznahorkai's remarkable and singular career.

'I've said a thousand times that I always wanted to write just one book. Now, with Baron, I can close this story. With this novel I can prove that I really wrote just one book in my life. This is the book - Satantango, Melancholy, War & War, and Baron. This is my one book.' Laszlo Krasnahorkai