2024 Book Review #7: The Notebook Trilogy by Agota Kristof
With more snow days of late, which for me sometimes means reading on a couch, while the kids play around me, in between cooking and taking them for backyard luge rides, these are three enthralling books which I read in French, translated into English as The Notebook, The Proof and The Third Lie. I found out about them reading a recent article in the New Yorker, and discovered how Kristof lays bare the human soul in times of deprivation, a true test of knowing who we are and who others may be. The author was a Hungarian writer who fled her native country during the Soviet repression on foot to live in Switzerland and after being a bored clock factory worker and lonely wife, left her husband and started studying French to become an author in that language. "Two years in a USSR prison would have probably been better than five years in a factory in Switzerland,” she once said. The disjointed, sparse, emotionless, corrosive, truth seeking, bestial, stark, radical, relentles