Susan Sontag once described László Krasznahorkai as ‘the contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse’. In The Melancholy of Resistance, the work that introduced Krasznahorkai to English readers, a dead whale is displayed in the centre of a ramshackle town, the only exhibit of a strange ‘circus’ that shakes the inhabitants. In Satantango, a Hungarian hamlet that has been destroyed following the collapse of a collective farm comes under the spell of a con man posing as a saviour.

Krasznahorkai’s latest novel, Herscht 07769, presents us with a small community in which one of the residents is experiencing apocalyptic visions. The numbers in the title form the postal code for Kana, a fictional town in the state of Thuringia in central Germany. Thuringia was one of the first states in which the Nazis achieved real political power; it is also the location of the Buchenwald concentration camp and the birthplace of Johann Sebastian Bach.

The novel’s central character, Florian Herscht, is a low-IQ lummox who dresses in salopettes and a Castro cap. A ‘muscleman Godzilla’, he doubles as a bodyguard for The Boss, his employer-cum-guardian. The Boss is a ‘kind of thought leader’ in a local neo-Nazi group who snarls and spits anti-Semitic monologues