No 16
Agota Kristof
I read. It’s like an illness. I read everything I can get my hands on, my eyes on: newspapers, school books, posters, pieces of paper found on the street, recipes, children’s books. Anything in print. I’m four years old. The war has just begun.
The Illiterate (2004) is the story of a life told in sixty four pages. In eleven fragments and through bare phrases as sharp as needles, Agota Kristof condenses Hungary’s soviet regime, exile in Switzerlansd, and proletarian life. At twenty-one years old, Kristof crossed the border carrying nothing but two bags: one with things for her baby, another one laden with dictionaries. After all, literature, that incarnation of the useless, has an unyielding value in her life: it provides pleasure. During childhood, she enjoys making up stories to fool her younger brother; at boarding school, where she spends her adolescence, writing is solace; and poetry, her own way of subverting the dull sadness of work at the factory. For someone who is sick in love, the illiteracy forced upon her by the language of exile is the synthesis of a broken life. And to learn to read in French, to read again, is such a pure expression; radiant, and desperate: “I can read, once again I can read (…) Everything is filled with books, comprehensible books, finally, for me too”. It is a reunion with the joy of childhood, like a ballerina who has just recovered the ability to do her pirouettes
