The Last Wolf (translated by George Szirtes) is Krasznahorkai in a maddening nutshell-it features a classic obsessed narrator, a man hired (by mistake) to write the true tale of the last wolf in Spain. This miserable experience (being mistaken for another person, dragged about a cold foreign place, and appalled by a species’s end) is narrated-all in a single sentence-as a sad looping tale, a howl more or less, in a dreary Berlin bar to a patently bored bartender.

Herman (translated by John Batki), a peerless virtuoso of trapping who guards the splendid mysteries of an ancient craft gradually sinking into permanent oblivion, is asked to clear a forest’s last noxious beasts. He begins with great zeal, although in time he suspects that maybe he was ‘on the wrong scent.’ Herman switches sides, deciding to track entirely new game …