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, relentlessly direct, sometimes perverse, sometimes fairy tale, blow by blow novels which make up the trilogy tell the story of pragmatic identical mirror twin brothers, unbothered by prevailing morals, creating bubbles within themselves, who experience war and occupation in a small border village in an unnamed county with their witchy peasant grandmother in a shack before tearing themselves apart.

Identity, and stealing one for ourselves, or losing it through difficult choices, is at the center of her work.

“What would my life have been like if I hadn’t left my country? More difficult, poorer, I think, but also less solitary, less torn. Happy, maybe,” she once wrote of being The Illiterate, the name of her 2004 memoir, seven years before her death.

Language itself is also a theme of the trilogy, (as is reading: a "sickness") and how the languages we speak can be enemies, can murder each other and the way we think and who we can speak to or who we are at our core.

The style evolves from novel to novel, as her French becomes more literary, expansive and pensive. It also reflects the journeys of the twins who seek to counter the mundane horrors they must survive with both flatness and rapid bursts of spontaneity.

One afterword called the twins “ethical monsters,” but they are also hyper realists who see the world and its failings, and eventually their own relationship to each other, as it truly is, or as an underlining elegy to fiction, as it might have been.