Abstract
One of the many contemporary translingual authors born in traditionally non-Francophone countries who opted to write in French, Ágota Kristóf offers an unsettling view of Europe and European conflict as she experienced them firstly in Hungary and later in Switzerland. The subject of this essay, Kristóf’s Le troisième mensonge (The Third Lie, 1991), focuses on issues of division and impossible belonging during the long years of the Cold War. The novel’s constant modifications of (fictional) realities and conflicting interpretations of characters’ origins serve as an allegory of Europe’s changing times during the East-West conflict, most obviously those of Hungary. Here, Kristóf offers a penetrating deconstruction of the violent, oppressive and alienating modes of existence created by national and ideological borders.
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- 1.
Davies, Europe, p. 1103.
- 2.
See Judt, Postwar, pp. 608–10.
- 3.
She alludes to the conditions of her Neuchâtel life in her novel Hier (Yesterday, 1997).
- 4.
Many Algerian-born women writers were schooled in French and quite naturally gravitated towards France to further their education. Such is the case of Assia Djebar, the first Arab woman to become a member of Académie Française and the author of Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Women in Algiers in Their Apartment, 1980). Leïla Sebbar, born to an Algerian father and a French mother, often wrote about her heritage, as seen in Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père (I Don’t Speak My Father’s Language, 2003). Also relevant here is Julia Kristeva, originally from Bulgaria, whose novel Les samouraï (The Samurai, 1990) describes the life of an intellectual raised behind the Iron Curtain who arrives in France and has to adapt to a highly strung avant-garde environment.
- 5.
In one of her interviews with Erica Durante, Kristóf states that it took her three years to write The Notebook, a relatively short novel of about 180 pages, because of the in-depth corrections and continuous fine-tuning (Durante, ‘Entretien d’Erica Durante à Agota Kristof, Vivre, poème inédit d’Agota Kristof: Introduction de Marie-Thérèse Lathion’, Viceversa: Revue suisse d’échanges littéraires, Vol. 2 (2008), p. 32).
- 6.
See Durante, ‘Agota Kristof: Du commencement à la fin de l’écriture’, Recto/Verso, No. 1 (2007), pp. 1–6.
- 7.
See the writer’s avowals about this period quoted in Manuela Cavicchi, ‘“Il n’y a que le présent”: la maledizione dell’esilio nelle opera di Agota Kristof’, Altre modernità/Otras Modernidades/Autres Modernités/Other Modernities, No. 2 (2009), pp. 175–6.
- 8.
Kristóf, The Proof, in Kristóf, The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie, trans. by Alan Sheridan, David Watson and Marc Romano (1986, 1988, 1991; New York: Grove Press, 1997), p. 259.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 261.
- 10.
Ibid., p. 285.
- 11.
Ibid., p. 287.
- 12.
Ibid., p. 324.
- 13.
Ibid., p. 259.
- 14.
Ibid., p. 334.
- 15.
Kristóf, The Third Lie, in Kristóf, The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie, p. 367.
- 16.
Kristóf, Proof, p. 336.
- 17.
By this stage, the only fact we can be sure of is the former existence of the deceased grandmother, ‘Maria Z., wife of V.’, who ‘during the war […] was entrusted with the care of one or more children’ (ibid., p. 338).
- 18.
Kuhlman, ‘The Double Writing of Agota Kristof and the New Europe’, Studies in 20th Century Literature, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2003), p. 122. This article matches quite closely the tenor of the present essay, while future investigation might make use of volumes such as Marta Di Benedeto’s La question de l’identité dans l’œuvre d’Agota Kristof (2008) and Tijana Miletic’s European Literary Immigration into the French Language: Readings of Gary, Kristof, Kundera and Semprun (2008).
- 19.
Kuhlman, ‘Double Writing’, pp. 126, 122, 122.
- 20.
Ibid., p. 126.
- 21.
Ibid., p. 126.
- 22.
Ibid., p. 129.
- 23.
Ibid., p. 129.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 133.
- 25.
Kristóf, Third Lie, p. 345. Further references to this novel will be given in parentheses in the text.
- 26.
Carine Trevisan attributes emotional anaesthesia to Kristóf’s characters, who show all the signs of the psychological conditions related to extreme suffering (see Trevisan, ‘Les enfants de la guerre: Le Grand Cahier d’Agota Kristof’, Amnis: Revue de civilisation contemporaine Europes-Amériques (2006), http://amnis.revues.org/952 (accessed 16 September 2015). Within the vastly expanding field of trauma studies, Boris Cyrulnik asserts that one in two people will encounter trauma in their lives and that one in ten will be marked forever by traumatic situations (see Cyrulnik, The Whispering of Ghosts: Trauma and Resilience, trans. by Susan Fairfield (2003; New York: Other Press, 2010), p. 168).
- 27.
There is an abundance of problematic relationships between men and women in the trilogy, the analysis of which is beyond the scope of this essay. One of the studies on the topic is Simon Cutcan’s monograph, Subversion ou conformisme?: la différence des sexes dans l’œuvre d’Agota Kristof (2014).
- 28.
This publication may have been triggered by a cinematographic adaptation of The Notebook in the same year, which marked a continuous interest in Kristóf’s disturbing trilogy over the 27 years since it was initially published in French. The film, in Hungarian, has been circulated both with the original French title, Le grand cahier, and with the English title The Notebook. The director, János Szász, may have chosen the Hungarian language to emphasise the strangeness and ‘unhomeliness’ that is present in the novel.
- 29.
Žižek, ‘Ágota Kristóf's The Notebook Awoke in Me a Cold and Cruel Passion’, The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/12/agota-kristof-the-notebook-slavoj-zizek (accessed 30 April 2015).
- 30.
Ibid.
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Zupančič, M. (2016). Ágota Kristóf’s Europe: (Un)Connectedness and (Non-)Belonging in The Third Lie . In: Hammond, A. (eds) The Novel and Europe. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_3
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