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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, to bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, I'm thrilled because I'm in San Francisco at the station KQED.

The Hungarian writer, Lajlo Krasnohorkai, is here. The occasion is the publication of his novel, Satan Tango. He is one of the great European voices, which publisher New Directions has been making available to us.

This is the third of his novels to be published by New Directions.

With me is Jim Crusoe, the novelist whose most recent book is Parcifal. It's published by Tin House,

and you may have been listening last week when Jim named our guest Lajlo Krasna-Horkai as his favorite living novelist. And I thought it would be wonderful

to have Jim join us in interviewing Krasnah-Horkai today. I'm going to ask you to begin, Jim.

Well, it's true.

You are my favorite living novelist, so I thank you.

And I've been reading you for a while.

So here's one of my questions, my first question, at least, is if I were to describe one of the things I like best about your work is this combination of, I suppose, absolute hopelessness

and the fact that the world in a certain way as you see it is also very funny.

At least there's something very funny about the hopelessness, which of course reminds me of Samuel Beckett.

And at the same time, your world and Beckett's worlds are very different in texture.

And I wonder if you might sort of differentiate how you feel you're different than Beckett.

...