Illiterate

Agota Kristof was born in Csikvand, Hungary, in 1935. Aged twenty-one, Kristof and her husband and four-month-old daughter fled the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Uprising to Austria and were resettled in French-speaking Switzerland. Working in a factory, Kristof slowly learned the language of her adopted country. Her first novel, The Notebook (1986), gained international recognition and was translated into forty languages. Kristof ’s other work included plays and stories as well as The Proof (1988) and The Third Lie (1991), which complete the trilogy begun with The Notebook. She died in 2011.

‘The Illiterate is the story of a girl who lived for the written word - “I read. It is like a disease,” she begins - and of what happened to her when her language was taken away … This is a book of relevance today because we live in a world of migration, and Kristof shows it to us from within. It is one of the last books she wrote, slim and clean, but containing the accumulations of a lifetime.’ (John Self, Independent on Sunday) ‘Her descriptions – of those with whom she escaped and whose sense of isolation eventually leads them back to Hungary even at the cost of their lives, as well as those whose sense of despair brings them to suicide – offer an uncomfortable insight into the extreme vulnerability of those obliged to seek asylum abroad.’ (Eimear McBride, Times Literary Supplement) ‘This story of exile and loss, of how, for the refugee, the country in which she eventually settles, however kind and well-meaning its inhabitants, will always be a poor and inadequate substitute for the country of one’s birth, its language always an alien thing, however proficient she becomes in it – this is the story of so many people today that it is perhaps the story of our time, and Agota Kristof should perhaps be seen as our transnational bard.’ (Gabriel Josipovici)