On Sunday, December 7, the 2025 Nobel laureate in literature László Krasznahorkai made a rare public appearance to deliver the Nobel Week lecture in Stockholm. Crafted in prose and full of dreams about angels and rebellions, the speech had the same poignant, enigmatic poetry that shapes his novels. As opposed to “the angels of old,” the new angels, Krasznahorkai said, “have no wings, but they also have no message, none whatsoever. They are merely here among us in their simple street clothes, unrecognizable if they so wish.” He went on to speak about an old vagrant who was being chased by the police in a Berlin train station for urinating on the tracks – with much difficulty as his ageing bladder had to be coaxed and cajoled to do its job.
Was that vagrants an angel? Who are these angels and what are their vacant stares like? “They just stand there and look at us, they are searching for our gaze, and in this search there is a plea for us, to look into their eyes, so that we ourselves can transmit a message to them, only that unfortunately, we have no message to give,” Krasznahorkai went on to say – because we are all…
Source: The Nobel and the Booker remind us of the apocalyptic and absurd in Central European fiction
