Zack’s Reviews > Satantango > Status Update

This book is going to haunt me

Chapter 5 is the most devastating section of the novel. I am slightly impressed by this author’s ability to continuously open new punishing loops that won’t close with each section. I imagine that this is a book that will come together by the end but so far it’s just been the horrible lives of the few, poor people left in this wasted Hungarian town.

Really disoriented by this one. The second chapter presents this weird Kafkaesque bureaucratic nonsense—with two new characters being summoned to the police for reasons they don’t know (The Trial), and are reprimanded for apparently abandoning a project we (the reader) know nothing about—but then what’s interesting is that they are presented like a Quixote/Panza pair despite how Irimias is like the devil.