The Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai's magisterial novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumours. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find - music, cosmology, fascism. The novel's characters are unforgettable: the evil Mrs. Eszter, plotting her takeover of the town; her weakling husband; and Valuska, our hapless hero with his head in the clouds, who is the tender center of the book, the only pure and noble soul to be found. Compact, powerful and intense, The Melancholy of Resistance, as its enormously gifted translator George Szirtes puts it, "is a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type." And yet, miraculously, the novel, in the words of The Guardian, "lifts the reader along in lunar leaps and bounds."

    Based on detailed research, it provides new insights not only into the factors that favoured the ascent of Viennese Jewry and the antisemitic movements that accompanied its rise, but also into the ideological conflicts that have marked the 20th century. The author describes the impact of nationality struggles in the Empire and its repercussions on Jewish identity, and examines in detail the genesis of Zionism, Autonomism, Austro-Marxism and psychoanalysis as Jewish strategies and responses to the dilemmas of modernization. In doing so, he analyzes the problems of identity that affected the Jewish intelligentsia of Vienna and helped make it the scene of one of the most seminal intellectual revolutions in history. The book should appeal to scholars and students of European and Jewish history, social historians and the general reader with an interest in Vienna.