Speaking with quiet intensity in a language not his own, he always uses very, very long, flowing word combinations.

Some authors talk in easily understandable sentences, with full stops, but not Krasznahorkai. This is not only when writing, when thinking, he continues, but '… in daily life – if you are in a bar, and if you drink with somebody – your friend, your acquaintance, an unknown person who speaks, who tells you something – he wants or she wants to tell this something very, very much, because we all have only one sentence, and we are looking for this sentence where we have some power to say something, for one sentence, in one life we have only one sentence and everybody in a bar or in a school or in a university or everywhere, in the street are looking for their own sentence, and this man or this woman doesn't look for a pause, for this artificial, very easily understandable kind of sentence, no, he or she always uses always very, very long, fluent word combinations – this is very fragile, but fluent, you can't cut it …' '… the short sentence is artificial – we use almost never short sentences, we make pause, or we hold on a part of a sentence end …' he reaches for it with his left hand as it passes '… but this characteristic, very classical, short sentence – at the end with a dot – this is artificial, this is only a custom, this is perhaps helpful for the reader, but for only one reason, that the readers in the last few thousand years have learned that a short sentence is easier to understand, this is also a custom, but if you think, you almost never use short sentences, if you listen …' Slowly, patiently, with unstoppable momentum, he explains in his ramshackle English that the full stop is all very well for other writers, but it is not for him. He's discussing his disenchantment with the paragraph break and the full stop, expounding why the prose of his novels surges across the page in what his translator George Szirtes calls a 'slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type'.

The Hungarian writer is sitting in the armchair by the window, the morning after bewitching an Edinburgh festival audience with an electrifying reading from his novel Sátántango. P erched on the end of the bed in László Krasznahorkai's hotel room, I realise that I'm in the clutches of a formal dilemma.

Satantango laszlo krasznahorkai