Book 1 – The Notebook
So I don’t really know much about Agota Kristof, so I will have to fill in as I go and learn a little more. But she’s Hungarian by birth and writes in France, to where she immigrated when she was about 20. She’s also as much known for drama and for fiction.
This first of the three novels is relatively short, and especially notable for being quite sparse in its narration and detail, and written from an undistinguished collective voice of the twins. The twins are not noted by name in the story, and only at the end is there any specific differentiation happening.
The novel reads a bit like a fracture fairy tale — simplistic in its language, but also devoid of specifics related to time, place, and names. There is “Little City” and “Big City” and “Grandmother” who is “The Witch” and there are cobblers and soldiers and others.
But it seems quite likely we are seeing the occupation of Hungary from children’s eyes, where the danger is real, but less explicit as it would be for soldiers, and older people — especially Jews and other outsiders. There’s a reference to someone being exiled. Because it’s not explicit and because I am no expert in Hungarian history, I do think the connections are applicable to both occupation by Nazis or Soviets, or both.
So the book itself is about the things that people do to survive, not extraordinary circumstances, but especially violent ones. The twins move to Little City to live with their grandmother, and using Biblical lessons as their guide, begin to condition themselves to pain–physical and emotional–stillness and immobility of hiding, and girding themselves to making tough choices and committing to tough actions by being cruel and selfish in their demands. Their grandmother comes across as maybe an older version of this orientation to the world.
The Little City is populated by multiple other people who react to these circumstances in their own way–giving up, turning themselves out to sexual exploitation of the occupiers, running away, dying.
The language is the most definitive part of all of this novel. We are reading the journal of the title of the book, and we learn from the twins early on that they do not want their notebook to be subjective as much as possible and more to be an accounting of verifiable knowledge. And that’s what we get. Odd and off-putting, but also quite stark and brilliant.
Book Two – The Proof
In the second novel, which picks up almost immediately after the first novel, there’s a dramatic shift in the narration and tone. The language and sentences is much richer, more descriptive, contains more meaningful and understood dialog. Most importantly, the novel shifts from the collective “we” of the first novel to the third person narrator who provides the narrative distance this novel needs.
We now follow Lucas, one of the twins, now named for the first time, meander and wander through his small town, having been abandoned by his brother at the border. His brother is absent from his life, and because of their confused upbringing and sheltered life previously, he has no identity papers, and no history in school. In addition, many of the people who could affirm his identity are dead.
This doesn’t quite turn into a kind of Kafka nightmare scenario, but instead is reflective of Lucas’s lost sense of self in the disappearance of his brother, and so he begins to try to pick up the pieces of his life and finds himself drifting toward others who have lost people in their lives in confusing and inexplicable ways.
Book Three – The Third Lie
In the final novel, we pick back up with Claus, the missing brother from the first novel, now returned to his country after 35 years gone. He’s no longer a member of the country, and is repeatedly told he is an outsider regardless of his place of birth and early years. In addition, because he officially does not exist and no one remembers that he ever lived in this country, he has to prove his own existence. Mostly they simply think he Lucas, who also disappeared, but much later in life. This provides frustration because Lucas lived a full life, and Claus has as well, and does not simply want to pick up where the other left off.
The split in the twins which seems so violent and sudden at the end of the first novel and throughout the early part of the second novel is cemented here, namely in the first person narrative voice of this one.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Notebook-Proof-Third-Lie-Novels/dp/0802135064/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1549289812&sr=8-1&keywords=agota+kristof)