The Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai isn’t exactly a late bloomer. It’s just that the English-speaking world has been tardy in discovering what European readers already know: If gloom, menace and entropy are your thing, then Laszlo is your man.

Even before the work of Krasznahorkai was available in the United States, critic Susan Sontag had hailed him as a “master of the apocalypse.” But his first novel, “Satantango,” published in 1985 and made into a film in 1994, didn’t appear in English until 2012, and several works are only now being translated by New Directions and other publishers.

Strange things are always happening in Krasznahorkai’s absurdist universe. In “Satantango,” life on a failed, rundown collective farm is upset when two swindlers thought to be dead are spotted on the road into town. And in “War & War,” a depressed archivist finds a mysterious manuscript in a forlorn village, but he feels dark, conspiratorial forces pressing in on him when he tries to translate and publish it.

“I wanted always to make some absolutely original thing,” Krasznahorkai, 60, said recently when asked what motivates him to write the way he does. “I wanted to be free to stray far from my literary ancestors, and not make some new version of Kafka or Dostoyevsky or Faulkner.”

‘Mysterious and funny’ mind

Krasznahorkai, who has flowing white hair and piercing blue eyes, lives mostly in rural Hungary with his wife and three children, but he was in New York for a rare, extended visit. He taught at Columbia in the spring; was one of the star attractions at the PEN World Voices festival in May, giving what was billed as a master class with Irish novelist Colm Toibin; and stayed on to tend to the growing American interest in his work.

“His mind is a mysterious and funny one — it darts and moves and shifts and rises,” said Toibin, who has appeared on literary panels with Krasznahorkai, knows him socially and admires his work. “He has a mesmeric and breathtaking style, a style that pulls you and holds and keeps you, so that somehow or other, you can’t resist whatever rhythm he catches, which always has a sort of melody in it.”

That is not to say that Krasznahorkai is an easy read. He writes sentences that can go on for pages and pages: “The Melancholy of Resistance,” in which a bizarre circus wanders into yet another small town in the dead of winter, toting a gigantic stuffed whale, consists of a single 314-page sentence.

“When you start breaking down some of his bleaker descriptions, it’s very funny, almost a self-caricature,” said the Anglo-Hungarian poet George Szirtes, who translated “The Melancholy of Resistance” and three other books by Krasznahorkai into English. “He is certainly not without a sense of irony,” a characteristic that has led to comparisons to Beckett.

Because of that often claustrophobic atmosphere and because Krasznahorkai came of age under communism, his novels are often thought to be political allegories. But he is adamant that they are not. “No, never,” he said. “What’s more, I never want to write some political novels. My resistance against the Communist regime was not political. It was against a society.”

Krasznahorkai’s fondness for rural settings stems, he says, from his upbringing. He was born into a middle-class Jewish family (his father was a lawyer, his mother an employee of the social welfare ministry), in Gyula, a town on the border with Romanian Transylvania. He describes it as “quite a strange and melancholy place, full of lonely, enigmatic people”: The circus whale, he said, came from a particularly vivid childhood memory.

A period of aimlessness

He left to do military service but, he said, deserted after being punished for insubordination, beginning several years of drifting. He did social work among Gypsies for a while and played piano in a jazz trio that performed in rural Hungary, but he also studied literature and philology in Budapest.

Nowadays, Krasznahorkai’s status in Hungary is similar to what it was under communism, that of an outcast. The country is governed by a right-wing populist-nationalist party that he said represents “a very dangerous political direction” and that has little use for him, either.

“Just imagine Philip Roth and Don DeLillo living and working in the U.S. and being ignored,” said Jakab Orsos, the director of the PEN World Voices Festival and also a Hungarian. “Laszlo’s approach to life and art is so different from general political sentiments that it automatically becomes a political statement.”

The screenplays

In some quarters, Krasznahorkai is better known for the screenplays he has written, something he describes as a sideline.

He’s done five, all for, and with, the avant-garde director Bela Tarr, including the seven-hour “Satantango” and, most recently, “The Turin Horse,” based on an essay about Nietzsche.

Krasznahorkai and Tarr said they met early on Easter Monday in 1985; Krasznahorkai was sleeping off a bad hangover when Tarr started pounding on his door. Although “Satantango” had not yet been published, it was clandestinely circulating, and Tarr had just read it in a single sitting and ran to Krasznahorkai’s to tell him he needed to make it into a movie. Krasznahorkai said he did not and shut the door in Tarr’s face.

“Those long sentences, they may look like a kind of baroque, but it’s not true,” Tarr said in a telephone interview this month, when asked to recall his reaction to the book. “It’s so simple, and very pure. It was a kind of tableau, the lowlands setting, the terrible life the people had there. I got the manuscript at 9 o’clock in the evening, and when I finished, it was almost morning, and I had already decided, ‘This is for me.’”

The film version of “Satantango” was released in 1994 and quickly became a cult favorite, landing on some lists of the 100 best movies ever made. “The Turin Horse” won two prizes at the Berlin Film Festival in 2011.

“We are quite similar in character. There is nothing sentimental about ourselves,” Krasznahorkai said about his partnership with Tarr. “We are lonely figures who are absolutely uncompromising, and we love each other.”

After communism fell, and he could move freely, Krasznahorkai spent time in East Asia, which led gradually to a change in the focus and tone of his work. He has lived in Beijing and Japan, where he spent 2005 with a Noh theater troupe.

A novel reflecting that shift of interests, “Seiobo There Below,” was published in English last year. New Directions plans to publish another recent novel with Asian themes, “From the North by Hill, From the South by Lake, From the West by Roads, From the East by River,” as well as a collection of stories, “The World Goes On,” as soon as the translations are finished. And the University of Chicago Press plans to issue a 2004 novel focused on China, “Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens.”

“I wanted to find something from my world that was not only dark and apocalyptic,” Krasznahorkai said of “Seiobo,” named for the Buddhist goddess of mercy and inspired by his Noh experience. “I thought maybe I could write something from the other side and make something beautiful, as a gift.”