Already famous as the inspiration for the filmmaker Béla Tarr's six-hour masterpiece, <em>Satantango</em> is proof, as the spellbinding, bleak, and hauntingly beautiful book has it, that “the devil has all the good times.”<br /><br />The story of <em>Satantango</em>, spread over a couple of days of endless rain, focuses on the dozen remaining inhabitants of an unnamed isolated hamlet: failures stuck in the middle of nowhere. Schemes, crimes, infidelities, hopes of escape, and above all trust and its constant betrayal are Krasznahorkai's meat. “At the center of <em>Satantango</em>,” George Szirtes has said, “is the eponymous drunken dance, referred to here sometimes as a tango and sometimes as a csardas. It takes place at the local inn where everyone is drunk. . . . Their world is rough and ready, lost somewhere between the comic and tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death.”<br /><br />“You know,” Mrs. Schmidt, a pivotal character, tipsily confides, “dance is my one weakness.”