Why do we tell stories? For some it’s pure entertainment but for others it is a matter
of life and death. Shehrazad in 1001 nights had to tell stories so she could live another night.
Agota Kristof’s protagonists have a similar reason for telling stories.
For them it’s to cope with a tragedy. Too painful to say as it is.
So making up lies as a coping mechanism. It’s a form of grieving.
Hi everyone, thank you for watching. In this video I discuss one of the most famous
Hungarian novels of all time. The Notebook by Agota Kristoff is part of a trilogy.
The other two novellas are The Proof and The Third Lie. They all make up The Book of Lies
or Twins Trilogy in English translation. It’s no exaggeration that this novel blew me away.
Its storytelling is so unique, so surprising and mesmerising that it was a pure joy to read it.
First let me tell about the author. Agota Kristof (1935-2011) was born in 1935 Hungary
and fled to Switzerland when she was 21 and mainly wrote in French and she died in 2011.
This trilogy was written in French, not Hungarian. Her name sounds like Agatha Christy,
the English crime writer, but that’s pure coincidence I think. The Notebook, the
first novel in the trilogy won her the European Prize for Literature in 1986 as well as Austrian
and Swiss prizes in literature in 2001 and 2008 respectively. The three novellas discussed here
were published between 1986 and 1991. The English translation appeared in 1997. Please
don't confuse this with the cheap romance by Nicholas Sparks. This is a very different beast.
Summary: First let me summarise the
story. The Notebook, the first in the trilogy is narrated by a twin, Lucas and Claus. Their names
have the same letters, an anagram. Two people morphed into one. Two halves joined together.
They do everything together. We meet them when their mother takes them to their grandma’s house
so she can look after them during the war. They live with their grandmother called Witch
and she in turns calls the twin Sons of a Bitch. They live in an unmade town in an unmade country,
but most crucially in the last house in the city or country, close to a border. Hungary as a nation
is unique in Europe. Its language has no relations with the dominant language families around it.
Slavic people to the south, Latin to the east and Germanic to the west. Hungarian or Magyar,
is a member of the Finno-Ugric part of the Uralic language family. So it’s related to Finnish and
Estonian. Linguistically Hungary is on the fringe, the last house close to the border.
Here is a quote: “The frontier has been rebuilt. It is now impassable. Our country is surrounded
by barbed wire; we are completely cut off from the rest of the world.” Of course this refers to the
communist period in Hungary but you can also feel the sense of isolation of the people from their
ancestral place or spiritual past. In a sense that’s Hungary if one thinks in terms of language.
That’s where the twins live. In a hazy world of dreams. They also live on fringe of time. Time
too has borders like space. Borders are broken times into pieces just like earth is broken into
countries. Time borders are shrouded in mists because memory is always hazy and demarcation
is less visible. The World War 2 is raging. Then communist rule emerging. The Twins have their
own survival to care. They do everything to make sure they survive. This means lying, manipulating,
blackmailing and even killing. You meet them as small kids, but by the end you realise that
they're more than kids, less innocent, certainly not naïve but rather like manipulative grownups.
You’re shocked but also amused. Why? Because they’re kids. No matter how terrible they are,
you judge them as kids. That’s why everyone’s mistakes are easily forgiven if happened in
their youth. But we don't forget adults making mistakes. Kristoff plays on this idea beautifully.
The second book, titled The Proof, is narrated by one of the twins, Lucas who lives alone most of
the time. He works on the farm and plays music in bars to earn enough to survive. He falls in love
with an older woman who looks like his mother. He shelters a woman who got pregnant after having sex
with her own father. Lucas treats her like a wife and the child like his son. He divides
his time between a few people as if he runs an orchestra, playing all the instruments by himself.
For example he commutes between or rather juggles a priest, a woman with a child and her child, the
party secretary, a female librarian, a bookseller and few more. His connection is like the web that
connects all these people together so he moves between these people as it attached to a string.
He compensates his lack of family with the priest as a father figure—they play chess together,
which is an important pastime in Hungary, Yasmine, the single mother as wife, Mathi as his son, Peter
as friend, Clara as mother and lover. But none of them is enough for him. So he keeps his notebooks,
which is the first novella in the trilogy. He safeguards them. He revises them from time to
time. The Notebook is life story. His life. His missing twin brother. It’s in the notebook that
keeps him alive. This is quite shamanistic in a sense that the spirit of those departed can be
accessed and kept alive by those still remaining. In 18th century there was a movement among
intellectuals in Hungary trying to find where their ancestors had come from. Many Hungarians
would travel to central Asia, India and Mongolia to find their lost ancestors. Hungarians weren’t
alone in this. In my video on the Polish epic Pan Tadesuz I discussed how the Polish intellectuals
did the same by connecting their ancestry with a lost Iranian tribe called the Sarmatians.
The third book titled The Third Lie puts everything upside down. It’s narrated by Lucas, or
Claus, perhaps it is the same person who returns to his home country to find his brother. They meet
but his brother denies knowing him. We learn that the twins came from a well-off middle-class family
but their lives were shattered by a tragic revenge. It also tells that the first two novellas
were lies. Fantasy to cope with loneliness: “All this is a lie. I know very well that I was already
alone in this town, with Grandmother, that even then I only fantasized that there were two of us,
me and my brother, in order to endure the unbearable solitude.”
The first novella is perhaps the best and most original and second and third novellas merely
try to explain the first novel. One of the funniest scenes is when the grandmother on
the verge of death tells the children that she has some treasure buried somewhere and as she
tries to give them direction, before she even manages a sentence, the kids tell her that they
know where the treasure is. Grandma is shocked and the kids tell her that yes the treasure is buried
in her husband‘s grave. Her visit to the cemetery wasn't to remember her dead husband but to watch
the treasure. The kids run the show, the real mastermind behind so many events in the story.
The first novel is narrated by We, then second novel by He and the third novel, by the other He.
There is no I. Proust said that our past is sometimes the history of someone else. Agota
Kristoff reiterates that. Your past is not your past. It’s someone else. You make that person up.
Also Number 3 might be important here. It’s a trilogy. But many examples of three recurring in
the novels. For example, Lucas forgets to sell his produce for three weeks. The little girl forgets
to tell Lucas about going to visit the priest for three days. In Hungarian mythology the world is
divided into three, upper where gods live, middle where we live and under, where bad things live.
The first and second novels keep your emotions intact because they were told in a very cold
objective tone, without any emotions whatsoever as if a scientist is describing the events.
But the third one is packed with so much emotion so much sadness that kind of breaks your heart
but it’s wonderful and beautiful. I guess when there’s a tragedy in the in the family, those
survivors try to make up a story to heal their wounds. So the first and second novels were made
up tales after the tragedy. And the third one we learned that the mother actually killed the father
because he had cheated on her. In the process she had also injured her son Lucas. And the second son
Klaus is now looking after her. When Lucas does come and visit him he refuses to acknowledge him.
Lucas commits suicide. Here is a quote: “Physical wounds don’t matter when I receive them. But if I
had to inflict them on someone else, that would wound me in a way I couldn’t bear”
It made me think about our own history or our own past. If you think about it, we try to construct a
narrative, our own life for ourselves but most crucially for the society. We tell our stories
in a way that hide certain things, exaggerates at things and even lie in certain ways. So when
it comes to our own stories, it seems that we invent, modify and edit our own past in a way
that we think represents us better. So the novel basically deals with this idea of trauma and tries
to spin it in a way that is more digestible. Memory is pain. Pain is memory. As Tolstoy once
said that life is a dream and death is like waking up. The twins write their stories in a notebook to
keep their childhood dreams alive. Them together. Create an alternative reality. To alter their
past. To alter their shattered dreams. “No book, no matter how sad, can be as sad as a life.”
Style: The story is told in an objective, impersonal,
and almost autistic tone. There is zero emotion in the language. It reads like a history book.
Also the narrative is broken down into small sections and each section has a specific title.
This gives it a more scientific or non-fiction vibe to the story. The language is simple.
Barebones. No moral judgment. Chilling, tragic events described in statements, like a script for
a play or a movie. Quote: “You will forget. Life is like that. Everything goes in time.
Memories blur, pain diminishes. I remember my wife as one remembers a bird or a flower.”
Morality:
The twins don't understand morality in terms of good and evil, but more in terms of survival. They
help people not because it’s a good thing to do, but because they need their help. They lie. They
kill. They manipulate. They blackmail people to get what they want. They grow up to survive. Like
Frankenstein‘s monster‘s, they have no feelings no emotions. In some parts you feel the twin kids
are scientists. For example in one scene, they go out to beg on the street not to get food but
to observe people and learn how it feels to beg. I couldn't help but notice a certain similarity with
the Marxian notion of materialism here. Then when I googled, I found an article written by Slavoj
Žižek, a neo-Marxian intellectual from Slovenia about this novel. He says: “I would love to be:
an ethical monster without empathy, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of
blind spontaneity and reflexive distance, helping others while avoiding their disgusting proximity.
With more people like this, the world would have been a pleasant place in which sentimentality
would be replaced by a cold and cruel passion.” The twins appears to be from a pre-historic time,
survival is first and morality doesn't exist. Life has no meaning, love doesn't exist, and morality
is futile. Just survival. Pure and simple. But the weirdest thing in it is the notebook.
Diary. Stories. So ultimately in life, it is stories that give it meaning. Stories
make cruelty of life bearable. Stories you read or stories you make to cope with life.
“I don't think. I can't allow myself the luxury. I've lived with fear since I was a child.”
Sex:
Okay I cannot talk about this book without talking about the big elephant in the room. Sex. There’s
a lot of it. No romantic sex but just pure sex. Sex as a physical necessity. As the war is raging,
everything is simplified. Life’s more complex in peacetime. During war, the purpose is to survive,
a thing we have learnt to do for millions of years. The most basic of our instincts.
Evolution goes through ebbs and flows. Wars and then peace. In wars poor people die and in
peacetime rich people get richer. Men are cruel in this novel but so are women. In fact the two main
women in the novel are tyrannical, murderers, and abusive. Grandma runs the house like a dictator
and most likely had killed her husband. The twins’ mother was the one who killed her husband and son
in a rage. Of course men perpetrate plenty of pain and horror. The most horrific story
is that of a female neighbour who is so starved of sex that she has sex with animals
and when finally she’s raped so many times by soldiers that they conclude that she died happy.
Another Hungarian novel to consider is Embers by Sandor Marai which was published in 1942. It tells
the story two friends, two soldiers, Henrik and Konrad. Konrad had disappeared for forty years.
And when he reappears, Henrik invites him to his house for dinner. So the entire story takes place
over a dinner. But it’s not about two friends remembering the good old days or reminiscing
their past pleasantly. Oh no. This meeting is much darker. It’s a trial. It’s revenge.
It’s about confronting your past. And remembering those who perished in the war.
And betrayal. At the end, everything turns to ash. Embers. Agota Kristof created stories
to heal the past, here however, the two men bury the past. They burn it.
Sometime life is so messed up that the best way to deal to burn it.
I should warn you that Agota Kristoff’s Novellas can be confusing at times,
hard breaking and as well as cruel. But I hope this video has helped you with the confusing
parts but also hopefully prepared you mentally to take up the challenge of reading it. It’s a
masterpiece of fiction and storytelling. It’s one of those novels that as soon as you finish,
you go back to the beginning and start reading it again. That’s exactly what I did.