Yes, there is a fair amount of under-the-grass (sometimes over) anti-semitism in Hungary (and many other European countries), as well as racism towards people with darker skin, but certainly not every hungarian intellectual over 40.
I liked both of Annie Ernaux's books about her parents.
1)The writing is very bad (which is ironic because she got mad at Houellebecq for being a racist and said that he is translated a lot because he writes like shit so easy to translate). You take an average page of Ernaux (in French) and it's just not very... sophisticated at all, but then all the critics that like her say that this language "unmasks" the reality and is the perfect medium for "autofiction".
2)Her initial ascension has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of her writing(which is very bad), but rather with her "social" message. Her entire work is basically about how she is from a working class family background which is very horrible and sexist, and going to school and university is how she escaped this horrible environment(domineering dad, "rape" that's not really rape, abortions, etc.) . She is basically "anti-beauf" and that's all.
To summarize, I would say that she is like the left-wing analogue of Houellebecq, except that Houellebecq (rightfully) doesn't win the Nobel Prize for shitty writing. I'm certainly elitist a bit of a "reactionary", but for Ernaux its so flagrant that what got rewarded was the political message and not the quality of the writing.
don't worry, a reactionary will get their time soon enough again. last night, actually, my thought was: i bet it's gonna be a conservative (given the current political climate and how ironically "conservatism" is trendy as "avant-garde" despite the oxymoron in how conservative ideas are some of the most basic and mainstream ideas in the world)
As for reactionaries/conservatives winning, it's basically impossible for someone to win this award as a genuine "reactionary". The last genuine reactionary who won it was Solzhenitsyn, and it would never be awarded to him if they were aware of all of his views.
perhaps the same kind of hyperbole krasznahorkai likes to use when talking about the "arabs": "I'm sure the Arabs would accept me now that they're gonna cut off my nose, then my eyes, and then they'll poke my eyes out, my tongue rip it out, everything that sticks out of me, cut it off, tortured me, and then shoot me. So that is the Jewish past is enough for me. That’s all the family history" (https://www.szombat.org/kultura-muveszetek/krasznahorkai-las...) (...that's an example among many)
Considering there was literally just an attack on a UK synagogue by an arab, after which many people protested on the side of the attacker in London, you don't think there's a tiny legitimacy to his views?
Of course this is a rhetorical question, because your obviously don't think his views has legitimacy.
Just like it’s not ok to see all jews as part of the same murderous conspiracy, it’s not ok to see all arabs as part of one either.
In particular, it seems to be inversely proportional to fertility rate. The lower the fertility rate, the more racist countries seem to be (e.g: Italy, Korea, Hungary, Japan, etc).
Plenty of racism in India, Pakistan, China, MENA (where slavery is common, Libya has open air black slave markets), and Africa itself. And let's not even get started how plenty of these places are ravaged by petty sectarian, ethnical violence, or straight out civil wars between communities.
You just don't hear about all that because most of these places don't have a free press, or people are too busy trying to survive another day to testify.
There are at least 4/5 genocides happening right now in Africa & MENA, and I don't include whatever is going on in Gaza, can you name them?