This May, after decades of steadily gaining acclaim in the English speaking world, the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai was awarded the Man Booker International Prize. Even with this honor, and although he has packed venues in London and New York, Krasznahorkai’s reputation for difficulty will likely continue to limit his audience. Open one of his books and you will be greeted by pages of unbroken text that take readers into a labyrinth of ideas and minute details, contradictions and verbal energy that is unlike anything else in contemporary literature.

In contrast to the overriding trend in contemporary American literature, which can be crudely, though not inaccurately, generalized as being concerned with the psychological and emotional lives of individuals in specific sociopolitical settings, Krasznahorkai’s fiction is populated by ideas, and boiling through his flood of language is a very philosophic conflict with time. Teetering on the brink of madness, characters devise systems of meaning, devote themselves to art, follow charlatans and place their faith in absurd causes in the ultimately futile attempt to halt the onslaught of change.

This has led a number of critics to refer to Krasznahorkai as an apocalyptic writer, but over the course of his career, the often-unsettling tragicomedy of his vision has calmed into a sort of reconciliation—an acceptance of the fact that meaning, beauty and moments of redemption arise out of impermanence. Dualities such as the spiritual and the material, the inner and the outer, never exist in isolation, but always feed off one another. In an interview, Krasznahorkai remarked about his aesthetics of contradictions, “I am working on joining together two words, ‘yes’ and ‘no’, into an indissoluble, organic combination.”