The Last Wolf & Herman

The Last Wolf is Krasznahorkai in a maddening nutshell—with the narrator trapped in his own experience (having internalized the extermination of the last creature of its kind and “ locked Extremadura in the depths of his own cold, empty, hollow heart ”)—enfolding the reader in the exact same sort of entrapment to & beyond the end, with its first full-stop period of the book.

Herman, “a peerless virtuoso of trapping who guards the splendid mysteries of an ancient craft gradually sinking into permanent oblivion,” is asked to clear a forest’s last “noxious beasts.” In Herman I: The Game Warden, he begins with great zeal, although in time he “suspects that maybe he was ‘on the wrong scent.’” Herman switches sides, deciding to track entirely new game...

In Herman II: The Death of a Craft, the same situation is viewed by strange visitors to the region. Hyper-sexualized aristocratic officers on a very extended leave are enjoying a saturnalia with a bevy of beauties in the town nearest the forest. With a sense of effete irony, they interrupt their orgies to pitch in with the manhunt of poor Herman, & in the end, “only we are left to relish the magic bouquet of this escapade...”

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László Krasznahorkai, an innovative Hungarian writer, was announced as the 6th Man Booker International Prize winner in 2015. He chose to split the prize between two translators; George Szirtes (who translated Satantango & The Melancholy of Resistance) & Ottilie Mulzet (who translated Seiobo…