Words (that don't get stuck in your throat)

Abstract

The title of this editorial freely paraphrases the rarefied dialogue of a character in Karhozat / Perdition, the film by Béla Tarr—with a screenplay by the director and Laszlo Krasznahorkai, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2025—whose monochromatic world is a self-contained, oppressive, and claustrophobic place. In this world without transcendence, marked by the omnipresent mud and rain, but hypnotic in a gaze that lingers, without lingering, on the absurdity of life—as shown by the initial allegory of the enormous buckets suspended by metal cables in a permanent back-and-forth motion—in this absurd, severe, and misanthropic world, accentuated by the melancholic and also hypnotic music of Mihály Víg, words get stuck in the throat, and one character even asks if it makes sense to speak.