MY MATERNAL GRANDPARENTS were born in the former Yugoslavia, a nation bloodily dissolved in 1991. I was one year old. A decade later, on Easter, I brought potica, a babka-like Slovenian pastry my mother always made on holidays, to my Indianapolis elementary school. “Hey,” I said. “Here’s some Yugoslavian holiday bread,” because that’s what my family still called the former Republic at home. Of course I’d chosen to bestow these gifts—potica, my ignorance—on my geography class. My teacher guided me to the newly minted map across the room.
Interrupted childhood—the shock of realpolitik as filtered through a child’s eyes—lies at the heart of Hungarian writer Ágota Kristóf’s work. Born in rural Hungary in 1934, Kristóf fled after the 1956 Uprising to Switzerland, where she remained until her death in 2011. Her stories and novels are set during unnamed wars in unnamed countries once known as something else, amid shifting borders and toppled regimes. They often feature children, who report these upheavals with brutal clarity. The ruthless twin boys at the center of The Notebook (1986) made her famous, and undoubtedly constitute one of the most powerful child perspectives in the European canon. When adults, her protagonists are forever searching for the nations, families, and cities in which they were born, or, as Kristóf wrote in her own autobiography, for those years before “the silver thread of childhood [was] severed.” It’s a doomed kind of search. For those who succeed, lost kinships and homes, once recovered, turn out to be mostly unrecognizable.
Kristóf’s narrators are therefore in the habit of finding work-arounds, in the form of fictions, in order to keep their native contexts alive. Her speakers prefer to present multiple, recursive versions of their biographies (what was, what is, what could have been), refusing to prioritize the “reality” of any single one. The novels in which they feature are as a result fractal, placeless, and darkly funny, forever winking at their own metafictional games. “My childhood!” cries the possibly suicidal narrator (who may or may not be a war orphan, and who is in love with a woman who, for much of the story, seems not to exist) of the novella Yesterday, when a psychiatrist asks him to explain his early years. “Everyone is interested in my childhood . . . I had my childhood ready for every occasion, my lie was quite on point.” By Kristóf’s lights, there’s truth to this “lie.” The attempt to recapture a world that no longer exists must, perhaps, be iterative.
AFTER TAKING ASYLUM in Switzerland with her child and husband, Kristóf found work in a clock factory in the Francophone town of Neuchâtel, where she began the painstaking process of teaching herself French. Her debut novel, Le grand cahier, translated as The Notebook, immediately established her as one of Europe’s most important postwar authors. Kristóf would go on to publish all her plays and novels in French, which she nevertheless regarded as “foreign” for the rest of her life. Her enduring hostility toward her adopted language explains, in part, the chilling simplicity of her style. Convinced that she “would never write French as native French writers do,” she had to create a language of her own.
Based on Kristóf’s memories of growing up with her brother on the Hungarian front, The Notebook is set in an unnamed country during what seems to be the Second World War. It opens when two identical, unnamed twin boys are sent from “the Big Town” to “the Little Town” to live with their peasant grandmother, supposedly for safety. Isolated and afraid, they begin to record their experiences in an exercise book:
We are sitting at the kitchen table with our sheets of graph paper, our pencils, and the notebook. We are alone.
One of us says:
“The title of your composition is: ‘Arrival at Grandmother’s.’”
The other says:
“The title of your composition is: ‘Our Chores.’”
The novel proceeds as a series of these autodidactic “compositions,” and in the clipped, declarative twin-speak of the boys’ collective “we.” Their curriculum soon grows to include real-world survival exercises ranging from the horrible to the absurd: “Exercise in Begging”; “Exercise in Cruelty”; “We Expand Our Repertoire,” in which the twins dress up as clowns and juggle eggs “emptied and filled with sand” for drunks in the local bar. All is recorded in the notebook. They grade their work according to a bare-bones rubric that applies to the novel, too: “The composition must be true. We must describe what is, what we see, what we hear, what we do.” The imperative justifies The Notebook’s militant exteriority (we rarely enter the twins’ reflections on past events or future plans; we never receive a flashback) and rejection of sentiment, its matter-of-fact reportage. It is a perfectly constructed book.
The exercises soon begin to flirt with moral extremes. More or less abandoned, the twins train themselves not to feel, not to miss their mother, never to cry. In “Exercise in Toughening the Body,” they insult, kick, and beat one another until they go numb: “After a while, we don’t really feel anything anymore. It’s someone else who gets hurt, someone else who gets burned, who gets cut, who feels pain.” Dostoyevsky once imagined what would happen if Jesus were to walk among modern men; his answer, in The Idiot, was that the Savior’s radical moral code would seem to us cruel, childlike, even idiotic, but that his holy personage would remain nevertheless magnetic, irresistibly so. The twins—freshly immune to their own suffering—are imbued with a similar power. Child savants, they attract a rotating cast of fallen adults and outcasts, who appear before them almost as if seeking absolution; the boys are, in effect, the only adults in the book. “Is not my fault,” pleads an occupying soldier quartered in their grandmother’s home. “Yes, it is your fault,” the twins reply. “Yours and your country’s. You brought us the war.” They spend the remainder of the conflict meting out hard truths and justice to invading officers, pedophiliac priests, and anti-Semites.
Sometimes their adjudication results in radical compassion, though the twins wouldn’t call it that. At one point, they bring food and blankets to a defected soldier hiding in the nearby woods. When he thanks them for their kindness, they reply, “We weren’t trying to be kind. We’ve brought you these things because you absolutely need them. That’s all.” They go to great lengths to protect a wretched figure known as Harelip, a girl a few years their senior and the serial victim of sexual abuse. They are also capable of unflinching vengeance: when concentration camp prisoners are marched through town, the twins observe a housekeeper cruelly taunt a starving person with bread, making as if to offer a morsel before snatching it away. “I’m hungry, too,” she proclaims. (The twins’ grandmother, by contrast, “accidentally” spills an apronful of apples into the road, which the prisoners collect.) The twins see all. “Who were those people? Where are they being taken? Why?” they ask the local priest. “The Ways of the Lord are unfathomable,” comes the response. Dissatisfied, the twins break into the housekeeper’s home and stuff her stove with explosives—a successful act of premeditated murder the local policemen intuit but cannot quite prove.
Combining the moral thought experiments of the Dostoyevskian psycho-thriller with the postmodern propulsion of Fight Club, The Notebook is one of those horrifying, almost funny page-turners you stay up all night to read. We fall under the twins’ dark spell—but also under the enchantment of discovering the origin of the document we hold in our hands, written in real-time and according to the twins’ severe rubric. Kristóf seized on this metafictional potential, later extending The Notebook into a trilogy. Each sequel reflects back on earlier volumes like a hall of mirrors, creating an infinite regression of narrative unreliability. All roads lead back to the original grammar of belonging: Who is “we”?
The Proof (1988) picks up at the end of The Notebook, with—major but unavoidable spoiler alert—the separation of the twins on either side of a barbed-wire fence that represents the Iron Curtain. (It is only here, in this second installment, that we finally discover their names, “Lucas” and “Claus,” which are anagrams.) It is Claus who escapes over the fence, and Lucas who is left behind in “the Little Town” with the notebooks. We follow Lucas’s painful, lonely story until, at the age of thirty, he disappears over the fence himself. When Claus returns years later to find his brother, the townspeople (not to mention the reader) aren’t sure whether his appearance confirms Lucas’s incredible claim that he once had a twin, of whose existence the notebooks are “proof,” or whether Claus simply is Lucas; they are identical, after all. The novel casts recursive doubt on whether there ever was a set of twins, or just one boy who imagined a companion for himself as a coping mechanism during the war. As if—and this is the kind of metafictional pivot on which the trilogy so thrillingly and mind-bendingly turns—he had an imaginary “twin” to whom to delegate his pain.
In The Third Lie (1991), a middle-aged Claus/Lucas, having returned to his native land just as he does at the end of The Proof, is still intent on finding his brother. At the opening, he’s been thrown in prison because his tourist visa has expired. In a final retelling of the twins’ childhood, he explains that there were indeed two brothers, separated at the outbreak of the war, but only one was taken from “the Big Town” to “the Little Town” to live with Grandmother. Raised in parallel worlds, the twins have both become authors. (Kristóf’s own brother Attila, who stayed behind in Hungary, became a crime novelist.) Due to a fluke of immigration paperwork, both are now legally named “Klaus.”
The twins’ original criterion—“the composition must be true”—has by this point long since taken on the same ensorcelling instability of the Liar Paradox. What to make of the refugee-cum-novelist who insists, “This statement is the truth”? The crux of The Third Lie is that the brother who stayed in “the Big Town” refuses to recognize the other’s existence, so that we don’t know whose account to believe. Has our narrator mistakenly projected brotherhood onto a double who isn’t his brother at all? Or is the second brother simply unable to cope with the consequences of reunion, namely, the implication that he neglected and abandoned his own twin? “I try to write true stories but at a given point the story becomes unbearable because of its very truth, and then I have to change it,” reflects Claus/Lucas in his prison cell. “And so I embellish everything and describe things not as they happened but the way I wish they happened.” One’s wish turns out to be the other’s nightmare. The brothers are the only two who could possibly understand one another’s testaments. And yet, ironically, they can’t.
THE TRILOGY UNFOLDS with such shocking power that it leaves its readers unsure where to turn next, if not to more Kristóf. On offer are the absurdist dreamworld of Yesterday, Kristóf’s nine plays, and her slim autobiography, The Illiterate, all written with the same clarity and simplicity that characterizes The Notebook. Happily, New Directions has also just issued a translation of Kristóf’s short fiction, I Don’t Care, now available to Anglophone readers for the first time.
Kristóf’s nowheres are so haunting because they were once a somewhere—namely, Hungary. The flash fictions collected in I Don’t Care—call them “exercises”—likewise feel so rooted in her earlier work that it’s difficult to imagine reading them without that context. For those already familiar with Kristóf’s oeuvre, however, these stories offer fresh insight into the themes that obsessed her: nostalgia, cruelty, and truth refracted through “lies.” That is, fiction-making.
The stories’ comedic register echoes the dark ironies of the trilogy. Then again, not everyone will agree with Kristóf’s idea of a joke: “The Axe” recounts a one-sided dialogue between a policeman and a woman who has just murdered her husband. She successfully explains away every piece of evidence (“A really stupid accident, isn’t it?”) until, in the very last line, she slips: “The blood on my nightgown, that’s just a bit of my husband’s blood that splattered when . . .” Kristóf’s own favorite writer was the Austrian playwright and novelist Thomas Bernhard, whose work her friends found totally “unbearable,” but who made her laugh, she said, like no other author ever had.
The stories in I Don’t Care find further humor in punning on their own minimalist style. “Feelings aren’t really valued in art these days,” says a music teacher to a student who has been ridiculed for playing his instrument too passionately. (“Excuse me sir, but it’s so schmaltzy,” the other pupils complain.) Exchanges like these indicate Kristóf’s own sensitivity to the perils of hyper-compression, which, like the haiku, walks a knife-edge between profundity and pastiche. The more layers of irony and interpretation these very short shorts pack in, the better.
For this reason, the title is unfortunate. The English “I don’t care” lacks the portmanteau quality of Kristóf’s original C’est égal. A Franco-Swiss expression, the valences range from indecision (“No preference”; “Doesn’t matter”), to diminution (“It’s not important”), to a conjunctional pivot (“Anyway”). It also means, of course, “I don’t care,” but to the Anglophone ear this carries a youthful rudeness. Translators do not always choose titles, and Chris Andrews’s rendering is otherwise impeccable. One can imagine, however, that with this marquee the publisher sought to capitalize on the cool ennui that suffuses contemporary, internet-savvy Anglophone fiction—yet anyone who has read The Notebook, or who otherwise craves the stylish voices of the digital present, will revolt at the comparison.
What most of these stories “care” about—and deeply—is reconciliation and return, and the absurdity of sustaining such illusions when return has become impossible. They are full of travelers trying to reunite families after long separations, and the mirage-like quality that attends their fantasies of picking up where they left off. In “The House,” a young boy looks on horrified as his neighbor packs up to move: “You can’t do that, leave one house for another; it’s terrible, like if somebody got killed,” he protests. Later, having left behind his own childhood home, he hires an architect to recreate it; the copy doesn’t hold a candle to the original. A letter arrives, and in his obsession he imagines it’s from the one true house. “But houses don’t write letters,” the narrator intervenes. “It’s just his wife.”
In the fantastical “The Canal,” a man returns to the village of his birth to find his son. In his absence, the village has quite literally struck gold, one of several allegories for industrialization and capitalism that echo throughout the book. Now entirely rebuilt out of the precious metal, the place has become “one of a kind, a nightmare city.” That nothing is recognizable renders everything interchangeable, family included. Coming upon a child accompanied by a talking puma (an image echoed in Yesterday), the traveler asks: “Perhaps you are my son? Were you waiting for me?” “I wasn’t waiting for anyone,” the child replies, “but yes, you’re my father. Follow me.” C’est égal.
IN THE ILLITERATE, years after her own arrival in Switzerland, Kristóf describes watching a news program about a ten-year-old boy who died from exhaustion after trekking across Turkey and through the Alps in order to enter the country illegally. “My first reaction is that of any Swiss citizen,” she writes. “How could people have embarked on such a risky adventure with children?” Then she remembers: “You did the same thing, exactly the same thing. And your own child was practically a newborn.”
I Don’t Care invites rereadings of such scenes. In these stories, Kristóf’s enduring focus on nostalgia and narrative instability crystalizes into desire: the desire to have one’s story recognized by, or even in, another person. Reflecting on the trilogy after these hyper-compressed shorts, it’s that search for recognition—that’s me; that’s my child; you and I are twinned—rather than the search for truth, that echoes most profoundly. If the characters in I Don’t Care or The Third Lie despair, it is because they are blind; if they refuse to emote, it’s because they know their own experiences of loss are far too common. Still they fail to recognize their own siblings, parents, and lovers; they cannot see their own humanity mirrored in strangers’ plights. Finishing these stories, I was reminded that, in addition to admiring Bernhard’s comedy, Kristóf detected in his infamous misanthropy a belligerent kind of humanism: “He never ceased to criticize and to denounce his country, his era, and the society in which he lived—with hate and with love, and also with humor.”
It is a further testament to the humanism of Kristóf’s own work that today’s readers do not need much imagination to extend her fictions of displacement to the millions who, since her death in 2011, have fled Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, or Sudan—or to the millions more Palestinians trapped, at the time of writing, within Israel’s US-backed bombardment and blockade of the Gaza Strip, which human rights organizations around the world have variously denounced as genocide or ethnic cleansing. These are connections Kristóf would want us to make. She warned us repeatedly in The Illiterate against the hubris of imagining ourselves set apart from those who have lost their homes. Late in life, long after she’d mastered French and become a famous author, a neighbor swung by to tell her about the “amazing” television program she’d just seen about recent immigrants to Switzerland. The women worked all day in a factory before going home to care for the children and do the housework, the neighbor exclaimed. “And they don’t even know French.” This, of course, was once Kristóf’s plight. She can see it. The neighbor can’t. Who is “we”? Am I you? Like anyone forced to leave family, country, and language behind, the repatriated Kristóf—one of the postwar greats of European literature—would have rather stayed at home.
Jessi Jezewska Stevens is the author of the novels The Exhibition of Persephone Q and The Visitors as well as the recent story collection Ghost Pains, a finalist for the 2025 Story Prize.