The Last Wolf is two short stories - the title story and a two-parter called Herman - by Hungarian writer, and this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Laszlo Krasznahorkai who’s famous for being extremely prejudicial against full-stops. But I wanted to sample this author without having to read a nearly 600 page sentence like Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming so I opted for this shorter piece.
The Last Wolf is actually the only story that does the sentence-length story thing - Herman shockingly uses regular grammar. Neither are any good though.
The Last Wolf is about an author commissioned to write about the last wolf in the Extremadura region of Spain, and he has a rotten time of it, whining about his experience to a bored German bartender.
Herman is about a retired game keeper who loses his mind and begins waging war on his neighbours, setting animal traps throughout the town and maiming people - until they take it upon themselves to stop his terror campaign themselves.
Neither story is told in an even vaguely compelling way and came off as unimpressive and immediately forgettable. As for the author’s one-sentence approach, it is a comprehensible style of storytelling although it isn’t an effective way of making the story especially memorable or vivid in the moment - quite the opposite in fact - although this might just be the author’s lack of ability, as his second story does utilise full-stops throughout and is just as dull.
I’m sure fans of this author will tell me that The Last Wolf isn’t the best place to start with him, blah blah, but I don’t care - I saw nothing special here to want to keep reading more books by this guy.
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