by
Alan Sheridan (Translator of The Notebook),
David Watson (Translator of The Proof),
Marc Romano (Translator of The Third Lie)
Contains spoilers.
By the time I had finished this trilogy of novels I had no idea what had happened. I thought of Escher's famous drawing in which one hand draws another hand drawing the other hand. Except to properly represent the procedure Agota Kristof adopts in these short novels one of the hands should contain an eraser and be in the process of eliminating the hand that is drawing it.
In the fractured society she creates; in the dislocated time in which these characters have to live and in the desolate location where the twin boys who are central to this story are brought to live, there is no certainty, except the usual one: death. Those two boys - names unknown in 'The Notebook' - tell a story that is frequently startling in its plainly told brutality. They narrate in the first-person plural and so we are there with them, horrified that we can begin to see and comprehend the world as they do. We begin to feel included and implicated in their "we". Kristof's great skill is to always be convincing as she brings us through the process by which - to better survive the wartime situation of which they are unavoidably a part - the twins rid themselves of all instinctive feeling and manage, by a series of exercises, to locate all pain outside of their bodies. By this method they can be witness to the most distressing events and be, apparently, unaffected. They have an anthropologist's detachment in viewing the circumstances of their own lives: they beg, for example, not for money, but "to observe people's reactions". It also means that they are prepared to aid others in what, in other circumstances would be thought to be acts of empathy and kindness, but are in the boys world-view merely practical solutions to a dilemma of which they have become aware. The extent of their detachment is made especially clear in a final act of stark, numbing nonchalance. And then..."we" becomes "he" and one boy is lost and one boy is lost without him. The he has a name now, Lucas, a young adult, functioning to some degree in society and displaying some sense of humanity by giving shelter to a young woman and her baby. He evinces little warmth however and as the baby becomes a boy, he is savagely protective of him, but lacks any understanding of the boy's need for assurance and that element so little seen in this trilogy: love. It seems absent too in Lucas' relationships with women. How could it be otherwise? The consequences of this lack, more than any other, are horrific. Not since seeing the throat slitting scene in Haneke's 'Hidden' have I gasped as I did when Lucas is presented with the results of his neglect of the boy Mathias. By the end of 'The Proof' we are forced to ask questions we should have asked earlier. Who is writing this? What is the significance of those notebooks of which we have heard so much? How can this narrator see everything? A brother returns and everything becomes unclear. And then...we are lost. "He" has become "I" and nobody is where they should be. Twins or one boy alone with his imagination? Parents dead or alive, or one dead and one alive? Who crossed the border, father or unknown soldier? This is all deftly done, the shifted reality is clear and convincing. This unstable, perturbing narrative is less fraught than much of what has occurred before but it does still demand our acceptance. Nothing is easily given in this extraordinary trilogy and this is a wonderful way to conclude it. We should be bewildered by all we have experienced. There can be no certainty, no consolation, no resolution. There can only be doubt (and I doubt all of the above).
“I answer that I try to write true stories but that at a given point the story becomes unbearable because of its very truth, and then I have to change it. I tell her that I try to tell my story but all of a sudden I can’t-I don’t have the courage, it hurts too much. And so I embellish everything and describe things not as they happened but the way I wished they happened.
She says, “Yes, there are lives sadder than the saddest of books.” I say, “Yes. No book, no matter how sad, can be as sad as a life.”
Also well worth reading is the author's brief, autobiographical essay,' The Illiterate' (translated by Nina Bogin, CB Editions) which details the difficult and - in her judgement - unsatisfactory circumstances of both language and location, which led to the very particular style and approach she brought to the writing of 'the Notebook'.
