Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai
Gotta admit: after reading the Warning on page one, I almost put this one on the back burner. Twenty pages into the main story, however, I was swept away by an incredibly ardent undertow. The paragraph/sentences were in no way as overwhelming as the Warning. If anything, these “sentegraphs” felt more like I was pulling the string of a Mattel “Farmer Says” See-N-Say, bouncing from character to character with such flawless fluidity that I occasionally had to come up for air, take a five-minute break, then dive right back in. Wonderfully exhausting.
Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai, (List Price: $29.95, New Directions, 9780811226646, December 2025)
Reviewed by Ian McCord, Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia
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I first saw a bog body in the British Museum, and I just thought, How amazing. This is a real person who lived and breathed 1000s of years ago, and I can still see him, and we can learn so much about him and his life, from his body and from studying him. And his people buried him in this place where I think they knew that he would be preserved, and I can imagine them, you know, hoping that maybe we would understand them. One day, I visited the bog where he was found. I really learned so much from that landscape, which today is quite degraded from its former state, but it’s still breathtaking to see, and there are spots of real biodiversity that could come back if protected properly. So I really got obsessed with bogs themselves and with the moss that creates the bogs, and the way it can operate as a colony, not as a single organism. And I really wanted in this book to talk about the non human world. I think that people tend to think that we always drive events on the earth, but there are many other organisms here that have huge impact on us, in our lives, and I really wanted to share that too. 
I wrote it in a month-long spurt, and sent it to the publisher. I didn’t do any research for the book, but I drew upon years of personal experience, and the history of disabled people that I studied at university helped me, too. I was conscious that it was special in the sense that I knew Shaka was a protagonist of a kind that hadn’t been written before.”
There are books whose urgency barely needs to be articulated because it’s so evident within the work itself, and Hunchback seemed to me like one of those: it burns itself right into the mind of the reader. It’s a cinematic work, that conjures up a dense and vivid world with very little, so the language needed a lot of honing, to make sure that it was hitting all of those imagistic notes in the way that they needed to. I’d say the principal narrative voice came to me quite quickly and intuitively, but there are lots of shifts of register within the span of the book, which took quite a lot of time and attention to capture. ”
I’ve always been a writer who puts character first, and when I embarked on writing this novel, I was prepared for some deep character dives. But Buckeye is larger in scope and size than anything I’d ever attempted, and I had no idea of the depths that awaited me… What I learned–what I keep learning, as a writer–is that when you bring a lot of characters together, a story emerges, and it’s not always the story you thought you were going to write.
