A lot has already disappeared from this fictional world, and the writer concentrates on filling the sentence, using it to notate and reproduce the tiniest qualifications, hesitations, intermittences, affirmations and negations of being alive. But this division is not really a sharp one, because augmentation in the avant-garde novel often looks like a kind of subtraction: augmentation takes the form of an intensification of the sentence rather than an intensification of the things that many people habitually associate with the novel-plots, characters, objects.

Postwar avant-garde fiction, like postwar conventional fiction, has tended to move between augmentation (abundance, immersion, getting more in) and subtraction (reduction, minimalism, what Samuel Beckett called “lessness”): Beckett started out as an augmenter, and ended his life as a subtracter.

“Reality examined to the point of madness.” What would this look like in contemporary writing? It might look like the fiction of László Krasznahorkai, the difficult, peculiar, obsessive, visionary Hungarian author of many works of fiction, only two of which are available in English, “The Melancholy of Resistance” (which appeared in Hungarian in 1989, and in English in 1998) and “War and War” (which appeared in 1999, and was translated in 2006), both published by New Directions.

Krasznahorkai’s translator describes his work as “a slow lava-flow of narrative.” Photograph by RENATE VON MANGOLDT

Krasznahorkai laszlo satantango