Notebook Alan Sheridan translator Agota Kristof 9780957326699 Books
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Notebook Alan Sheridan translator Agota Kristof 9780957326699 Books
This book was written in a stark, almost emotionless way. Yet, it is a powerful story. Also, the ending is a jaw-dropper!Product details
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Notebook Alan Sheridan translator Agota Kristof 9780957326699 Books Reviews
This is very different from anything I have ever read before - something in between William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" and Elie Weisel's "Night". The savagery and cruelty is at such a level that sometimes it seems a little erotic. This is a very different view of the Nazi occupation and then Russian involvement in the East European countries. The story is about a twin and their grandmother surviving during second world war. They survive (actually they thrive) but had to bury their emotions and transform themselves into savages. They destroy their emotions and feeling systematically and clinically so that even traces of it cannot be found.
The whole book is narrated in first person plural and the author never mentions a single name to identify any person which is unique. The names does not mean anything nor does the relationship - all that matter is what one can get and survive. You can still see touches of humanity in these boys when they bring money and food to their friend Harelip but the amount of emotions involved in these relationship are extremely limited. The boys kill but are not troubled since to them it is one more act similar to gathering food and daily chores. I enjoyed reading it and hope you will also enjoy it since you do not come across this kind of book everyday. Translation by Alan Sheridan is also quite entertaining.
"The Notebook", first published in French in 1986, tells the story of two twins who are sent to live with their grandmother during the war. The time and place are unspecified, but one can assume this is a small Hungarian village during the Second World War, eventually 'liberated' by the Russians.
The twins, who jointly narrate the novel, are a self-contained unit. Through a series of self-imposed exercises they manage to inure themselves to pain, cruelty, and also love. Their detachment is chilling, and is accompanied by an equally chilling (but also perhaps righteous) morality - one based on the concept of absolute need.
The short episodes which make up the novel are compelling, vivid, and often horrifying. The sparse factual narrative, stripped of any commentary, combined with this uncompromising moral landscape creates a world which insinuates itself into the reader's mind and lingers there long after the book is finished.
A bare boned and stripped back book, where all that exists is pared to the materially extant and the practical. It reminded me of the barren world of No Country For Old Men or the spare divorces of The Outsider. It is a series of vignettes that tells a story and has a narrative progression, albeit skeletal and linear. But each vignette is a repetition, a restated way of a bare way of being. And there's a weird, terrifying consolation in that.
The twins, the book's main characters, are detached from the emotive world and turned toward each other. But perhaps it is this inner outside-ness, this requirement of reaching the other twin, which still gives them a foothold in the larger social world [even if more built on representational similarity than empathy] and they sometimes seem more in the thick of feeling and understanding [or at least insight] than the conventionally well adjusted. This is the dilemma. Like their detached, entirely practical and yet humanly functional ethical behaviour. The book walks tight ropes. It is starkly etched yet beautiful, resonant with tears of loss and yet cool and emotionless and non-judgemental, like the twins themselves.
This book, the first volume of a Trilogy, is set in an unnamed occupied country during a war. The country is unnamed, but it is pretty obvious that it is Hungary, where the author was born in 1935 and where she lived until 1956. The main characters, also unnamed like all the others in the book, are twin brothers. Their age not given, but their voices have not yet broken. (At one point we are told they still have their milk teeth, though that is quite unbelievable.– perhaps the first indication of the unreliable narrator.) It is only in the next volume that we learn their names and that they were nine years old when the story begins. They do everything together.
They originally lived in the capital, which has been badly bombed. Their mother cannot look after them, and sends them to live with their Grandmother who lives in a smaller town near the frontier. The Grandmother is generally known as “The Witch”. Everything in that house – rooms, persons, clothes – is absolutely filthy; and she is physically and mentally cruel to the boys. These boys are quite remarkable they respond by deliberately hardening themselves against physical pain and to insults, and apparently also against feelings and any kind of moral responsibility about stealing, blackmailing and killing. I say “apparently” because they do feel compassion for a girl called “Harelip” and her sick mother, and they do what they can to help them; they respond to people who are kind to them; and there are other indications that they do have creditable feelings.
They are also auto-didacts, and they keep a notebook in which they record only facts, but no judgments. Though we are not specifically told so, the novel would appear to be that notebook, for it records only facts but makes no comment on them. Each chapter is only about three pages long. The style is austere and laconic, and compelling.
The boys observe sexual activity, and learn about masochism – the latter from an officer of the occupying army who is billeted on the Grandmother’s house. They witness food-shortages, air raids (which don’t frighten them), deportations, house searches. They are brutally interrogated. The occupying army is beaten, but people are as terrified of the other foreign army which has come to “liberate” them and would take revenge on those suspected of having collaborated with the first lot of occupiers; and they witness looting and raping by their successors. The notebook is unemotional in describing several terrible scenes and two acts of mercy-killing perpetrated by the boys; unemotional also at the very end, some years later, when (aged 15, as we will learn from the second volume) they commit a ruthless act that prepares us for “The Proof”, the next volume of the Trilogy.
This book was written in a stark, almost emotionless way. Yet, it is a powerful story. Also, the ending is a jaw-dropper!
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