![]() ![]() It’s as if the novel is being composed in real time, an illusion deepened by Kristóf’s use of the present tense. One says to the other, “The title of your composition is: ‘Arrival at Grandmother’s.’” This brother, meanwhile, has assigned the first one to write about “Our Chores.” These happen to be the titles of early chapters in The Notebook, the very text we’re reading. At the stationer’s, they help themselves to pencils and “a big thick notebook,” flatly informing the owner, “We have no money, but we absolutely need these things.” The twins assign each other themes to write about. Though the local school has shut down because the male teachers have left to fight, the boys regard education as essential to survival. Much of the novel’s brute force comes from its unadorned descriptions of children preyed on by adults: the twins themselves are molested by a masochistic foreign officer and a randy housekeeper, encounters they relate with eerie equanimity. The Little Town has other secrets, too, like the priest who molested a pitiable girl nicknamed Harelip. The twins learn that locals call her the Witch, for allegedly poisoning their grandfather. (The boys’ journalist father is absent, reporting from the front.) The old lady sniffs that she’ll make them work for their keep.Įvery day, she tends to her garden, takes produce and game to market on boozy evenings, she “talk in a language we don’t know,” arguing with some invisible interlocutor before she collapses in sobs. She has brought them here because “the Big Town is being bombed night and day, and there’s no food left.” She begs her estranged mother to take them “till the end of the war” while she returns to the Big Town. The Notebook opens like a dark fairy tale, with its boy narrators uprooted from the besieged Big Town to the Little Town where their mother grew up. Yet these soundalikes and doppelgängers also hint at the nature of her oeuvre, which brims not just with murder and incest and bestiality-a character in Yiyun Li’s recent short story “Wednesday’s Child” calls Kristóf’s novels “worse than pornography”-but with slippery doubles, falsehoods, and jolting narrative tricks. This singularly powerful book and its creator-a Hungarian in Switzerland who wrote her major work exclusively in French-can seem laughably close to anonymity. The theorist Slavoj Žižek, selecting The Notebook as “a book that changed me” for The Guardian in 2013, confessed that when he first heard the name “Ágota Kristóf,” he thought it was an Eastern European mangling of “Agatha Christie.” ![]() It was fun to imagine one of them renting the film adaptation of the Sparks weepie and marveling at how Kristóf’s macabre duo (“We cut our thighs, our arms, our chests with a knife and pour alcohol on our wounds”) came to be embodied by Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams. Years ago, when assigning my graduate students Ágota Kristóf’s The Notebook (1986)-a hair-raising novel told from the perspective of identical twin boys in an unnamed war-torn country-I’d joke that they shouldn’t confuse it with the identically titled Nicholas Sparks best seller. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |