In 1956, Ágota Kristóf fled Hungary with her husband and infant daughter after the Soviet army suppressed the Hungarian revolution. Eventually settling in Switzerland, Kristóf did not become literate in French, the language in which all her published works were written, until several years after she had arrived in her adopted country. In Kristóf’s memoir, The Illiterate, she reveals that her books were written with the aid of a dictionary and states, “I will never write French as native French writers do, but I will write as I am able to, as best I can.” In doing so, the poet Valério Magrelli claimed that “Kristóf invented a new kind of French.” Kristóf’s haunting, bare-bones style reminds me of Samuel Beckett, another non-native speaker who wrote in French. Like Beckett’s work, the very short stories collected in I Don’t Care are marked by absurdism/surrealism, nihilism and pessimism occasionally leavened with irony and humor.
I Don’t Care is replete with strangeness. A talking puma features prominently in one story. In another, a man claims to be both a statue and the artist who sculpted it. Violence and death hover over these fictions. A husband takes an axe to the head. A child howls that he wants to kill his parents because they bought him a spinning top instead of a rifle. In “The Big Wheel,” a murderer confesses his love for the only person he does not want to kill:
“You can walk in the streets. You can go drinking and walk in the streets. I won’t kill you. Don’t be afraid. The city is safe. The only danger in the city is me… But you, you have nothing to fear…I’m not your enemy. I love you. And no one else could harm you.” A line from “The Writer” could serve as a parody of European pessimism or dialogue from an Ingmar Bergman film: “Solitude, silence and the void – the horrible trio – blow my roof open, they fly up to the stars, reach away to infinity …”
The humor that is featured in a few of the stories is wry and understated, a half-smirk at the absurdity of life. “The Invitation,” about a husband who hollowly insists he will take care of all the arrangements for his wife’s birthday celebration, could have been penned by Dorothy Parker. “Wrong Numbers,” which recounts increasingly odd plans made after a phone call and a case of mistaken identity, is reminiscent of the funny Israeli writer, Etgar Keret.
Many of the stories grapple with the question posed in Kristóf’s memoir: “What would my life have been like if I hadn’t left my country? More difficult, poor, I think, but also less solitary, less torn. Happy, maybe.” The title story introduces the theme of exile that runs through the collection: “And tomorrow? You get up, where do you go? Nowhere? Or, I don’t know, maybe I will go somewhere. I don’t care, anyway, nowhere feels right.” From another story: “I will go home, to a home I never had, or so long ago I can’t remember it, because it was never mine, not really.” The longing for home frequently takes the form of deep emotional attachment to the inanimate — houses, streets, statues — rather than to other humans. It is when Kristóf relates the separation between people and the objects they love that her dry, unemotional prose shifts registers and produces heartrending passages such as this where a boy speaks to his former house: “Are you suffering as much as I am? he asked one afternoon when the October rain was beating pitilessly against the gray walls of the house, and the windows were rattling in the wind. Don’t cry, he shouted, sobbing. I promise I’ll come back and stay forever.” The devotion to these structures and places is unrelated to their uniqueness or aesthetic appeal; rather, they serve as the emotional locus of all that is lost when a life is uprooted.
Although the stories are often opaque and mystifying, it is a testament to the author’s versatility that several of the most successful are written in a realistic vein. In “Mailbox,” an orphan checks his mailbox twice a day with the hope of receiving a letter from his birth parents. “Death of a Worker” is a spare account of a life suffocated by factory work arranged for maximum efficiency and minimum human connection and meaning (Kristóf worked in a Swiss watch factory for five years). “My Father” is a moving account of an exile returning to the country of her birth for her father’s funeral. Kristóf’s alternating between the surreal and the realistic could be a metaphor for the worldview that permeates her work: when life isn’t incomprehensible, it is merely sad.
Ágota Kristóf is best known for her Notebook Trilogy (The Notebook, The Proof and The Third Lie). The trilogy centers around twin boys left by their mother in the care of their grandmother (known locally as “the Witch”) during an unnamed war, presumably World War II. The novels follow the brothers as they navigate life in wartime and the post-war dictatorial regime by developing their own moral code, which combines acts of altruism and kindness with cold-blooded pragmatism and cruelty. The novels share much of the backdrop and sensibility of Kristóf’s short stories: a world where the possibility of violence is ever present, a deep attachment to place, and an exploration of the malleability of identity. Kristóf’s minimalist style seems to me more suited to novels, where the dry, simple prose is able to gain a slow-rolling momentum in a way that often does not occur in the stories collected in I Don’t Care. This is not to minimize the achievement of the stories, which have their own sudden power, but I think they best serve as a gateway to Kristóf’s novels (interestingly, a few of the stories first appeared as passages in the novels).
A very particular vision runs through Kristóf’s work. She doesn’t flinch from the horrific or the hopelessness of lives lived during war, under tyranny and in social and cultural isolation. However, Kristóf approaches the ugliness of the world not only straight ahead through her unadorned prose but also sideways through incorporation of surrealistic and fairytale-like elements, including long passages recounting characters’ dreams. The result is a body of work that feels askew, as if by processing reality through the workings of the unconscious, the bleakness of existence can at least be altered, if not improved. In this regard, the narrator’s musing in Kristóf’s final novel, Yesterday, seems apropos: “The trouble is, I don’t write what I ought to write, I write just anything, things that nobody can understand, things that I don’t understand myself.”
In one of the few interviews Kristóf gave, published in Music and Literature, she makes clear that her works are highly autobiographical, an acknowledgement of the traumatic life that gave rise to her art. When asked if there was any message to be taken from her books, she answered: “Of course not. I don’t want to have a message. No, not at all. I don’t write like that. I wanted to say a little about my life. That’s how it all started.” Beginning with such modest aims, Kristóf managed to create a remarkable oeuvre and a startilingly original contribution to the literature of exile.
[Published by New Directions on September 3, 2024, 89 pages, paperback, $13.95]