David's Book World

After an extended break, I’m making another attempt at getting back into blogging at least semi-regularly. Maybe it will only be for specific occasions, or a couple of times a month, or maybe longer – let’s see.

Stu at Winstondad’s Blog is hosting a Hungarian Literature Month this February. I’ve decided to revisit Ágota Kristóf, who escaped from Hungary to Switzerland in 1956 at the age of 21, when the Hungarian Revolution was suppressed, and subsequently wrote in French. I have previously written about Kristóf’s Notebook trilogy (see here and here). Today I’m looking at I Don’t Care, a story collection originally published in 2004, and now issued as part of the Penguin International Writers series in Chris Andrews’ translation.

When I read Kristóf’s trilogy, I was struck by how austere the writing seemed, flattening out details of place and time – and yet how deeply felt it still was. That impression remained with this story collection: the title I Don’t Care seems very much ironic to me.

For example, ‘The Invitation’ consists largely of a husband’s dialogue as he enthuses over throwing a birthday party for his wife, Madeleine, despite her being clear that she he doesn’t want one. After the party, the friends have left, the husband is asleep, and Madeleine is left to clear things away. The piece ends on a simple statement: “she goes to the bathroom and takes a long look at herself in the mirror.” But there’s such a weight of unspoken emotion behind that statement, coming as it does after we’ve seen Madeleine crowded out of her own story and life.

Reality itself can seem to shift when mediated through Kristóf’s prose. ‘The House’ begins with a ten-year-old boy aghast at the thought of anyone moving away: “You can’t do that, leave one house for another; it’s terrible, like if someone got killed.” A few years later, though, the boy has moved house himself. He goes back to visit the old place, but feels betrayed when he finds that someone else has moved in. Time then races ahead in the story, with the boy never quite able to recapture the sense of connection he had with the house. By story’s end, in an uncertain time and place, the boy is an old man revisiting the house, or maybe he’s the ten-year-old yet to leave. Beating underneath it all is the longing to keep hold of the past.

‘Wrong Numbers’ encapsulates my experience of reading Kristóf’s stories. Its protagonist often finds people dialling his number by mistake. He tells of one occasion when he received a call from a woman meaning to ring Marcel, an acquaintance or possible lover of hers. After a conversation, the woman invites the protagonist to meet at a café the next day. He accepts, and changes his appearance to suit what she likes – but he is not happy with the stranger he now sees in the mirror:

He’s better than I am, more handsome, younger, but he’s not me. I wasn’t as good, or as handsome, or as young, but I was used to what I was.

This is a moment of reflection in two senses, and the patterning in Andrews’ translation there illustrates how space is opened up for the protagonist to think, when he might so far have seemed to act largely on impulse. I find it easy to underestimate how much Kristóf’s prose draws me in, because it seems so unassuming at first. But there is a whole world of lost opportunity in this tale of a misdialled phone call – and I can say something analogous across the stories in I Don’t Care.