READING THE NOTEBOOK by Theadora Walsh
“I read. It is like a disease.” — Ágota Kristóf
Ágota Kristóf’s The Notebook is a pleading text. It’s a series of physical gestures. It stutters out a humanity while competing narratives shoot holes in shared experience. It’s the single best book about grasping at reality. Narrated by a pair of twins, nameless throughout, who speak in plural first person as a “we,” Kristóf quickly introduces a world of estranged intimacy. The twins have been separated from their parents and sent to their estranged grandmother’s house in the Hungarian countryside to wait out the remainder of World War II. An atmosphere of violence, the threat of invading soldiers, and the scarcity of war keeps Kristóf’s protagonists homebound for much of the story. Their world of two is small, and it is constantly under threat.
The twins quickly learn that their grandmother, their abrupt guardian, will be no source of comfort. She berates them, hits them, demands they work constantly to earn their keep. Rather than succumb to fearfulness or a sense of abandonment, though, Kristóf’s twins resolve to embody a kind of pathological acceptance of their new enclosure. Together, they buy a notebook and begin to fill it with short emotional exercises and survival tactics. Quarantined, the twins get older without a society. They replace social structures, education systems, maternal love, paternal control—everything—with lines in a notebook.
“We don’t want to blush or tremble anymore,” they write, “we want to get used to abuse, to hurtful words.” They dedicate hours each morning to whipping each other with belts. On some days, they commit to silence; on others, they walk through the village to expose themselves to cruel obscenities brandished by their unwelcoming neighbors. Kristóf’s novel has an unremarked-upon brutality to it. It’s full of the type of violence that populates fairytales. Short sentences tell of severed appendages. Relentless evil is everywhere.
Take, for example, a chapter entitled “Exercise in Cruelty”. It begins without pretext: “It’s Sunday. We catch a chicken and cut its throat.” Bare-bone and lightly fictionalized experiences, composed by the twins, make up the novel’s short chapters. As time passes, the twins mature into their context and grow into the sentiments of war. They kill, they strip corpses, they mete out punishments, they understand sex as a kind of domination. Their youthfulness is constantly accompanied by radical disregard for authority.
Ágota Kristóf was born in 1935, in Csikvand, a small Hungarian village near the Austrian border. The story told in The Notebook is largely an autobiographical account of her return to that village in 1944, when her parents sent away from the city to wait out the war. The novel is, Kristóf remarks in an interview, “after all my life, my feelings…”
According to Google Maps, Csikvand appears as a number of derelict wooden structures pressed against a thin road. There are two churches and little else. One church is modest, engraved with a cross, the other a cavernous building made of orange brick and plaster. It’s easy to imagine the twins there in the village under the dominion of their estranged grandmother, whom the other villagers call “The Witch,” digging for root vegetables in her front garden.
In the novel, the housekeeper of the village’s church is pretty, and she’s nice to the twins. Though their total indifference to God surprises her a bit, she’s charmed by their odd didacticism and becomes one of the only villagers to show compassion about their situation. However, when a Jewish transport is moved through the village, she reveals herself to be cruel. “The housekeeper smiles and pretends to offer the rest of her bread; she holds it close to the outstretched hand, then, with a great laugh, brings the piece of bread back to her mouth, takes a bite, and says: ‘I’m hungry too.’” After witnessing this, the twins attempt to blow her up by hiding a cartridge from an army rifle in the firewood she uses to tend to the stove. In an interview, Kristóf confides that the housekeeper was based on her own real nanny, whom she saw taunt a group of Jewish people being forced through Csikvand on their way to a death camp. Young children are prisoners of circumstance, but not in The Notebook.
Kristóf hardly believes in adjectives. She commits, instead, to relentless precision. In sparse and immediate language, she twists words into their most succinct and compact forms. Intestinal, worlds are arranged on top of one another. The result is writing that’s immediate, unpretentious, and naked—relevant regardless of context. In The Notebook, she describes a code for writing which the twins follow closely. So closely, in fact, that if either of them deviates at all, the other pronounces the writing “Not Good” and throws it into the fire. The harsh duality mirrors the unflinching approach the twins take to judging other people. “We have a very simple rule: the composition must be true… For example, it is forbidden to write, ‘The Little Town is beautiful,’ because the Little Town may be beautiful to us and ugly to someone else.”
Honesty, which The Notebook rigidly attempts, flattens experience. The book’s plot is secondary to its formal demonstration that something is irrevocably lost when sensation is forced into language’s presumed universality. Everything that is just is—there is no interpretation, and no insistence on reason. It’s surreal. Brutal at times. Obscene. It’s difficult to write about cruelty without aestheticizing it. Language is not equipped to maim. Gore and violation too often become a type of richly descriptive subjugation, taking on degrees of sensuality. Kristóf successfully avoids this by trapping horror in her curt sentences. The prose itself, not its content, is dispossessed and bodily.
After the 1956 Hungarian uprising, a 21-year-old Kristóf walked across the Hungarian border to Austria with her baby and her husband. Eventually, she settled in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, where she worked in a clock factory. A political exile overnight, she left her home permanently and slowly began to lose hold on her native language. It is French, not her native Hungarian, that hues each line in The Notebook with a sincere anguish over the difficulty of arranging memory. “Completely by chance, I arrive in a city where French is spoken…It is here that my battle to conquer this language begins, a long and arduous battle that will last my entire life.”
The story’s refusal to narrate from a subjective position, to be soft, may create an honest account of experience, but it’s also an extremely lonely kind of storytelling. The omnipotent indifference with which the twins write forecloses any possibility of empathy. Although their lives are filled with dejection, cruelty and disinterest—and occasionally visited by outright war—the book does not invite pity or kindness.
Love isn’t much examined in Kristóf’s writing. Perhaps it’s too abstract, too changed from the immediacy of lust. Sex, though, features heavily. Her writing handles it unflinchingly, portraying amorous movements of the body as animal and unromantic, often a violation. Harelip, the twins’ neighbor, embodies a kind of obscene but non-threatening sexuality. She’s a bit older than them and has a harelip. “She’s cross-eyed, she has snot in her nose and yellow dirt in the corner of her eye,” and, to introduce herself, she says: “I’m called Harelip. I like milk.” The twins become protective of their neighbor; they arm themselves with razor blades and socks stuffed with gravel to defend her from cruel villagers. She often offers to reward them with sexual favor, which they demurely reject. She’s unbelievably horny. The twins make note of who she sleeps with, the animals she fondles, and how she touches herself diligently—but they make their notes without judgement. “Harelip runs by. She doesn’t see us. She lies down in the grass and lifts her skirt. She isn’t wearing underpants.” In The Notebook, sex is like eating or pulling potatoes out of the garden—something done frequently and without consequence. Love doesn’t fit in. Perhaps because love, if permitted to be written about, might threaten the strict rules of objective writing the twins outlined for themselves.
Even before Kristóf left Hungary, she experienced profound isolation. She was separated from her father when he was deported in 1949, and then from the rest of her family a few months later when she was ordered to a boarding school for destitute girls. The school, Kristóf wrote in her short memoir-like novella The Illiterate, was something between an orphanage, a barrack, and a convent. In order to bear the pain of alienation, she settled on “only one solution: to write.” During long hours spent in silence at the boarding school’s compulsory study hall, she began to keep a journal, in which she wrote: “I even invent a secret handwriting so that nobody can read what I’ve written. I note down my troubles, my sorrows, my sadness, everything that makes me cry silently at night.” Her tone is one of steady desperation, attenuated with a palpable desire to be integrated into the reader’s consciousness; to have her fractured memories be received. She’s seductive, jumping out of the story and into the actual moment of reading. The Notebook’s first person “we” becomes an imploring address, an incantation for companionship.
On leaving Hungary forever, Kristóf wrote: “It is as if everything took place in a dream, or in a different life. As if my memory refused to remember this moment when I lost a large portion of my life.” Here, Julia Kristeva’s writing on abjection and literature come to mind. “‘I’ is expelled,” Kristeva writes, “The border has become an object. How can I be without border? That elsewhere that I imagine beyond the present, or that I hallucinate so that I might, in a present time, speak to you, conceive of you—it is now here, jetted, abjected, into “my world”.
In The Notebook, Kristóf writes her childhood back into her sense of self after a brief but permanent rupture relegated her to the West and her past to the East. Like the twins, she combats the alienation of war and of border changes by binding experience to the written word—even though she knows that once secreted away in print, her memories will be forever beyond the pale, entombed in a foreign language. In this way, writing becomes like dying. She’s a carpenter, chiseling away at herself before anyone else can—so that, like the twins, she controls her own pain.
Theadora Walsh is a writer and video artist based in los angeles who makes moving texts, essays, and fragments. Her writing has been published in Gulf Coast, sfmoma Open Space, Apogee, Vol 1 Brooklyn, Unbag and elsewhere.