Bøker av Agota Kristof

Agota Kristof's celebrated trilogy of novels exploring the after-effects of trauma and the nature of story-telling in the context of Nazi occupation and Soviet 'liberation' at the end of World War Two.

A troubled villager flees to the city's comfortable anonymity - a respite that's shattered by the appearance of his boyhood love, her husband, and child. "Fierce and distinctive." - Kirkus Reviews.

Above, below, blue heads, thistles. Somebody singing something. I don't care: it's not even pretty. The song is sad, and old, so old.Written immediately before her acclaimed Notebook trilogy and selected by Ágota Kristóf herself, I Don't Care presents the Hungarian master at the height of her game. Harrowing yet delightfully whimsical, these short fictions oscillate between parables, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone. In Kristóf's world, cruelty abounds, but in a way that shifts the reader's gaze to aspects of our shared reality, past and present, that one would not want to be without. The themes of exile and existential alienation are undeniable - as is the force of every sentence, making for extraordinary and essential reading that surprises at every turn.

Narrated in a series of stark, brief vignettes, The Illiterate is Ágota Kristóf's memoir of her childhood, her escape from Hungary in 1956 with her husband and small child, her early years working in factories in Switzerland, and the writing of her first novel, The Notebook. Few writers can convey so much in so little space. Fierce yet almost pointedly flat and documentarian in tone, Kristóf portrays with a disturbing level of detail and directness an implacable message of loss: first, she is forced to learn Russian as a child (with the Soviet takeover of Hungary, Russian became obligatory at school); next, at age twenty-one, she finds herself required to learn French to survive: I have spoken French for more than thirty years, I have written in French for twenty years, but I still don't know it. I don't speak it without mistakes, and I can only write it with the help of dictionaries, which I frequently consult. It is for this reason that I also call the French language an enemy language. There is a further reason, the most serious of all: this language is killing my mother tongue.

Narrated in a series of brief vignettes, The Illiterate is Kristof 's memoir of her childhood, her escape from Hungary in 1956 with her husband and small child, her early years working in factories in Switzerland, and the writing of her first novel, The Notebook.

The first time her plays have been available in English, the complete collection of Agota Kristof's works for the stage.