Ágota Kristóf and the Uses of Illiteracy

When the Hungarian author Ágota Kristóf was a child, she grew bored of the tales that her grandmother would tell her and her two brothers over and over again at bedtime. One evening, little Ágota announced to all that from now on she would be the storyteller. In her slender memoir “The Illiterate,” recently republished by New Directions, with an introduction by the novelist Helen Oyeyemi, Kristóf describes composing her first works of fiction: “I begin with a sentence, any sentence, and the rest follows. Characters appear, die, or disappear. There are good characters and evil ones, poor and rich, winners and losers.”

Kristóf, who was born in 1935, is perhaps most widely known as the author of a harrowing trilogy of novels—“The Notebook” (1986), “The Proof” (1988), and “The Third Lie” (1991)—that arcs across the war-ravaged lives of the twin brothers Claus and Lucas. Though the brutal tale is based on Kristóf’s memories of the Second World War, she claims in her memoir that her own early years were bucolic, happy. Everything made sense: “In the beginning there was only one language,” she recalls in “The Illiterate.” Her father was a teacher in the village, and their family home abutted the schoolyard that she would run across to see him. It was there, sitting in the back of his classroom, that she first caught, and delighted in, “the incurable disease of reading.”

The idyll was short-lived. Although stories and storytelling came easily to her, Kristóf would soon find herself at odds with her own tongue, dislodged by circumstance from the power of speech, from expression. This schism would recur in her life and finally shape her chillingly precise prose. At age nine, she moved with her family to a town near the border of Austria and heard German, “an enemy language,” spoken. By the time she was ten, the Russian occupation had begun, and foreign languages other than Russian were outlawed. When her parents sent her to a state-run boarding school, Kristóf took comfort in expressing her feelings in code: “I start writing a kind of journal,” she recalls in “The Illiterate.” “I even invent a secret handwriting so that nobody can read what I have written. I note down my troubles, my sorrows, my sadness, everything that makes me cry silently at night in my bed.” Later in her life, she told the scholar Riccardo Benedettini that the private language in those journals had also become alien to her: “. . . I couldn’t read even if I wanted to. I have forgotten it.”

During the Hungarian uprising of 1956, Kristóf walked across the border into Austria with her husband of two years and their four-month-old daughter. Although she had little interest in politics, her husband’s dissent from the Stalinist government led by Mátyás Rákosi necessitated their escape to avoid persecution. Her husband carried their child. Kristóf carried two bags, one filled with baby clothes, diapers, and bottles, the other with dictionaries. Several of their politically active friends who remained in Hungary despite their opposition to Rákosi served two years in prison. Kristóf herself spent five working in a clock factory in Switzerland alongside other Hungarian exiles who had also been relocated there. (She described her fourth novel, “Yesterday,” as a “very autobiographical” account of this experience.) Kristóf lived in Switzerland for the rest of her life—even marrying for a second time and having two more children. But it was not, and never felt like, home.

Fresh feelings of unbelonging took root in her inability to communicate with those around her. She notes in her memoir that, five years after she arrived in Switzerland, she could speak French but couldn’t read it: “I have become illiterate once again.” Kristóf eventually became accustomed to her new tongue. At the age of twenty-six, she enrolled in classes at the University of Neuchâtel. Within a few years, she was reading Sartre, Camus, and Victor Hugo, and eventually writing her own plays. Although she wrote in French so that her words, her stories, would be read, she insisted that “all my books are about Hungary.” Like German and Russian, French was “an enemy language” imposed upon her by circumstance.

Kristóf published “The Notebook,” her first novel, in 1986, when she was fifty-one. As it begins, the young twin brothers Claus and Lucas have been taken by their mother to live with their grandmother in the countryside during wartime. The titular notebook records the torture, incest, bestiality, pedophilia, masochism, starvation, degradation, rape, and murder taking place around them. The greatest horror, however, may be how easily Claus and Lucas normalize and neutralize extreme violence. After witnessing and experiencing such suffering, they have no use for heroism or morality. What they value is survival.

Toward the end of “The Notebook,” the twins’ father returns home from the war to learn that their mother, his wife, is dead, buried in the same hole made by the shell that killed her. He decides to dig her up and arrange for a cemetery burial, but when he finds two skeletons at the bottom of the makeshift grave—hers, and that of a daughter she’d had by another man—he takes off, leaving Claus and Lucas to clean everything up:

We carry the skeletons up to the attic in a blanket and spread the bones out on straw to dry. Then we go down and fill in the hole where nobody is lying anymore.

Later we spend months smoothing and polishing the skull and bones of our Mother and the baby, then we carefully reassemble the skeletons by attaching each bone to thin pieces of wire. When our work is done, we hang Mother’s skeleton from one of the attic beams with the baby’s skeleton clinging to her neck.

Kristóf’s sentences are like those skeletons, commemorations of indescribable sadness that have been meticulously scrubbed of gore and gristle. In visual art, negative space engages a viewer’s attention, even just momentarily, on emptiness. The same could be said of Kristóf’s work. She seems to sculpt her stories by omission, the great unspoken throughout her books being Hungarian.

She maintained that her omissive style was due in part to the fact that words can never precisely express what an author means to say. Additionally, she wrote, “I know I will never write French as native French writers do, but I will write it as I am able to, as best I can.” Yet she deployed her estrangement as a kind of protection, both for herself and her readers. She explained, “I use French as opposed to Hungarian to create distance between my terrors and my writing.” This distance might be understood the same way one would an act of translation, which admits the natural slippages between language and life—between a story as it is lived, as it is remembered, and as it is told.