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While I believe that his other Hungarian novels are more perfect in execution, in Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming, Krasznahorkai's thesis is writ large. There are no saviors, no heroes, no prophets but false prophets. Love, Power, Money, even Zen are impossible vehicles for salvation in the world. In Krasznahorkai's fictions, nothing can save you, for all is already lost.

More than his other novels, everything in Baron is not-quite, all connections are missed, everything occurs too-late if at all. Even epiphany, immanence, is a false god which only illuminates the path taken as wrong, while obfuscating the path proper.

There are many moments to love in this novel. The Professors efforts of thought inoculation, his hourlong bursts of anxious brilliance. The two funerals and their attendant ironies. The brilliant character of Dante, and of the Baron (perhaps the best wrought manifestation of Krasznahorkai's Myshkin-like Innocent). The utterly brilliant episode of the Baron's clothes.

In attacking the full scope of modern apocalypse, this is Krasznahorkai at his most acerbic, broadest, and most zany, with Pynchon-esque scope. A different Krasznahorkai from his honed and anxious modernism of his other Hungarian novels, but still a strange joy to read.