[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_90

The notebook trilogy, Agota Kristof, 1986 - 1991

The three books of the Trilogy were lent to me by a friend who used to be passionate about contemporary Eastern European authors. I owe her a good part of my Post-WWII Eastern European bibliography and my strong interest in Agota Kristof. When I received the book of her trilogy and first met her name, I thought it was a Hungarian mispronunciation of Agatha Christie. This was not the case: the name Agota Kristof was original, and there was no intent to emulate Christie, neither in content nor literary style.

Agota Kristof's narration differed from what I was used to; her writing is dry, intriguing, and dark. The style of her stories ranges from the restlessness of surreal situations to the dryness of the truths closest to everyone's daily life. I couldn't tear myself away from the books; I devoured them in a crescendo of anxiety and morbid curiosity.

Kristof tells the life of two twins, Lucas and Klaus, and the network of their acquaintances from the Second World War to the author's present, the 1980s. The brothers are described as identical, and it is impossible to distinguish them: Kristof makes them interchangeable, staging a pathological and maniacal brotherhood which, in the course of the narrative, transforms into its opposite, an abysmal

indifference and distance. The dark tones of desperation and promiscuity, of war and destruction prevail in all three books; every space of light is accompanied by its shadow area: where love shines, there comes the cloud of abandonment; desire sparkles only for the fog of disappointment, then to arrives; where the truth wants to dazzle, fiction steals the light.

“I answer that I try to write true stories but that at a given point, the story becomes unbearable because it’s very true, and then I have to change it. I tell her I try to tell my story, but suddenly, I don’t have the courage; it hurts too much. And so I embellish everything and describe things not as they happened but as I wished they happened. She says, “There are lives sadder than the saddest of books.” I say, “Yes. No book can be as sad as a life, no matter how sad.”