... a typically extraordinary translation from Ottilie Mulzet ... Ascribing Krasznahorkai’s allure to plot is rarely fruitful; at best, the events are an armature over which the thickened material of consciousness can drape and flow ... The great paradox of his fiction is that the speed and intensity of its sentences suggests a seething, maximalist vision, though what actually happens is quite modest in terms of developed incident ... The wonderful paradox of [Krasznahorkai's] thought-killing exercises is that they in fact produce endless waves of foaming cognition. In just a few pages, he touches on the concept of the infinite, fear as the birth of culture, the cowardice of atheism, and the pervasiveness of human illusion ... His fiction’s recursive darkness can obscure its ambiguous grace. It makes space for everything human, which is to say even—and perhaps especially—the inhuman and the frankly monstrous. This is not hysterical realism but the triumph of excess in all its startling, gravid particularity ... 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.

... superb ... a manic Greek chorus that infuses festive Technicolor into his multifaceted, bleak vision. It is Krasznahorkai’s funniest and most profound book and, quite possibly, also his most accessible. Krasznahorkai has hinted that this may be his final novel and, if that’s the case, then it is a tremendous sendoff to one of our most talented writers ... Krasznahorkai is an uncommonly generous writer. Even as he teases, maligns, and undermines his characters, he remains empathetic to their plights and blind spots, for he knows that even the most evil deeds are conjured by brokenness ... sections flow easily as Krasznahorkai’s meandering prose swaps points of view at each paragraph break, allowing his characters’ opinions to mesh and conflict. Incredible distance is covered in an oddly intimate, if disorienting, way. While this tactic can make a new reader initially seasick, the reader who sticks with it finds the going easier and the rewards many. The emotional and psychological realizations Krasznahorkai can evoke are singular and breathtaking ... As the world seeks to reduce and streamline communication, and as our attention spans are attenuated by our thirst for digital-world dopamine-hits, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming presents a powerful rebuttal to our infatuation with easy, saccharine anger ... precisely the novel we need in these difficult, foreboding times.

... his latest, longest, strangest, and possibly greatest novel ... though it has its confrontations with despair and nihilism, Wenckheim is the funniest of Krasznahorkai’s novels ... Part of Krasznahorkai’s genius has been his ability to absorb the tectonic changes of politics and culture into his singular style: his challenge of despair is applicable under any economic system ... Krasznahorkai’s work remains a powerful and pessimistic challenge to all forms of received thought, particularly intellectual laziness and the vain overestimation of our own goodness ... Maybe it is actually quite difficult to imagine the end of the world when we’re bombarded with so many false images of it. Figuring out who will get their face bitten off by a zombie on next week’s The Walking Dead (now entering its tenth season) isn’t a representation of the end of the world: it’s a franchisable facsimile of the world we can’t understand and maybe never could. Krasznahorkai invites us to consider more deeply the disorder that’s always lurked inside.

Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai is the kind of figure who seems as likely to inspire scoffing scepticism as prostrate wonder. If relatable psychological realism in cut-glass prose is what you’re after, it’s safe to say he isn’t your man. Told in a breathless cascade of sprawling sentences, his madly overstuffed and essentially nihilistic vision offers pleasure of a different order, if that’s a word to be seen within a mile of his work ... Twinkling with dark wit, his dizzyingly torrential sentences (heroically translated by Ottilie Mulzet) forever bait us with the promise of resolution ... This shaggy-dog story won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, yet it’s hard to think of anything comparable to the crazed abundance on show here; as a portrait of epistemological derangement – AKA fake news – it hits the mark as well as any more hidebound attempt to catch the zeitgeist.

... may not bring joy or consolation, but reading it is a mesmerisingly strange experience: a slab of late modernist grindcore and a fiercely committed exercise in blacker-than-black absurdity ... These journeys and descents have a morose density that’s made all the more potent by the book’s syntax...Long stretches of the novel lie there, slow and exhausting, like call waiting, drone music, middle age ... This is a high-wire act on the part of the author, and a gamble – or act of faith – on the part of the reader. It’s also an experiment in suspense that recalls the shaggy-dog detours of improvisational comedy. Krasznahorkai, though he’s often presumed to be a miserabilist, Mitteleuropan chiliast, is a very funny writer. He unfurls dense, seemingly endless sentences that are suddenly punctuated with unlikely phrases ... gloomy, frequently inert, boring, frustrating. Its more vatic passages can feel superfluous ... Yet it has a madness and monomania that compel. Exhilaratingly out of step with most contemporary fiction, it’s closer in spirit to Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, a novel whose syntactic difficulty creates a literary no man’s land for intrepid readers to yomp through. Not even 600 pages, it’s both too long and – in this era of rolling news and data dumps – far too short.

... profoundly, unsettlingly off-kilter, even in terms of the dark vision of his other novels. This is a novel that has orchestral movements, often discordant ones, unmarked perspective shifts, and puzzling undertones ... this isn’t a novel in which there is a possibility of redemption. If it has a major flaw, it is that its portrayal of the daily lives and quotidian thoughts of its narrators is less compelling than these moments of intense disruption and upheaval. Krasznahorkai is at his best in describing tumult, or the dark, unswept corners of the mind ... I was disappointed to feel that compassion sometimes missing in Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming. At other moments, however, the novel’s rage is convulsively persuasive.

... massive, intimidating, and disturbing ... it does stand atop its predecessors as a unifying lintel of Krasznahorkai’s work—and that knowledge of its predecessors greatly enriches the finale ... resists coherence and interpretation as much as anything by Beckett or Tzara (albeit more subtly), and so it vexes attempts at analysis ... [Krasznahorkai's] longest book by some measure, his funniest, and probably his darkest.

... fails spectacularly ... falls on the side of tedious; its prose falls about in self-precious fits and starts. It may admittedly be unfair to hold an author to the standards of his greatest achievements, and certainly there are passages here where the work shines ... Kraszhahorkai can be a master stylist; there are even startlingly wise lessons hiding in this work—yet the overall execution feels lazy, like a draft ... It’s probably also no fault of the translator that the work’s self-abnegating, often pedestrian tone and boring word choice works better in Hungarian ... As Hungarian culture continues to chart its own path, it’s possible this work’s faux political outrage as well as its prevaricating and smelly old-world charm remain relevant there. If so, that’s a sad metacommentary—but not sufficient reason for us to read it ... Some may suggest this book is a pinnacle of Krasznahorkai’s oevre. It is not. Why not take the time instead to read the author’s previous volumes, or something else important or beautiful? Finally, it is reflective of how much the ground may have shifted beneath our feet, that we may no longer have this much time to waste, sifting through muck looking for the gems.

Krasznahorkai establishes his own rules and rides a wave of exhilarating energy in this sprawling, nonpareil novel, which harkens back to early works such as Satantango but with the benefit of the Man Booker International Prize winner’s mature powers ... This vortex of a novel compares neatly with Dostoevsky and shows Krasznahorkai at the absolute summit of his decades-long project. Apocalyptic, visionary, and mad, it flies off the page and stays lodged intractably wherever it lands.

Krasznahorkai tends to long, digressive passages that build on and allude to other pieces, and the word 'non-existence' turns up often enough to suggest a theme. But no matter: In the end, the worlds the philosopher, the baron, and other characters inhabit are slated to disappear in a wall of flame, an apocalypse that, as Krasznahorkai assures, is not just physical and actual, but also existential ... A challenge for readers unused to endless sentences and unbroken paragraphs but worth the slog for its wealth of ideas.