By AFRANIO CATANI*
Commentary on Ágota Kristof's book
“You have to keep writing. Even when no one is interested.”
1.
I confess that until mid-2024 I had never heard of Ágota Kristof (1931-2011), a Hungarian writer who lived in Switzerland from 1956 onwards. Little by little, fortunately, her works are beginning to be translated in Brazil.
The pleasant surprise is The illiterate, a short autobiographical account, an excellent coming-of-age novel that is a quick read, as it is not much longer than an extended short story – each of the eleven chapters is on average four pages long. The book's blurb states that Ágota Kristof was awarded the Schiller Prize and the Kossuth Prize by the Hungarian State, and is the author of novels, short stories and plays.
2.
Ágota Kristof says that since the age of 4 she has read everything that comes into her hands and eyes: “newspapers, schoolbooks, manifestos, pieces of paper found on the street, recipes, children’s books. Everything that was printed” (p. 5). It was the beginning of the Second World War.
At that time, she lived with her parents, sister and brother “in a village with no train station, no electricity, no running water, no telephone” (p. 5). Her father was the only teacher in the village, teaching all classes, from first to sixth grade, with all classes in the same room. Her mother took care of the house, the children and the garden, with the school separated from the house only by the playground (p. 5).
When neighbors and friends discover that she has been able to read easily since she was little, they do not spare her: “She never does anything, she just reads”; “She doesn’t know how to do anything else other than that”; “It’s the most inert occupation there is”; “It’s pure laziness”; “She reads instead of…”; “There are so many more useful things, aren’t there?” (p. 7-8).
At the age of 14, she was separated from her parents and siblings and sent to a boarding school in an unknown city. “To overcome the pain of separation, I had no choice but to write” (p. 12). It was a school that took in 200 girls between the ages of 14 and 18, who were housed and fed by the State. “It was somewhere between a barracks and a convent, between an orphanage and a reformatory,” whose dormitories contained 10 to 20 people in bunk beds with gray mattresses and blankets. They woke up at 6 a.m. and had breakfast consisting of coffee with milk and a slice of bread. At 7:14 a.m., they lined up and went to school, “singing revolutionary songs” (p. XNUMX).
Total silence in the classrooms. Ágota Kristof begins to write a kind of diary, where she notes her unhappiness, afflictions and sadness, “everything that makes me cry quietly in my bed at night. I cry for the loss of my brothers, my parents, my home, now inhabited by foreigners. I cry mainly for my lost freedom” (p. 15). The school lights go out at 10 pm and a supervisor checks the rooms.
In your Self-analysis outline Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), writing about the period he spent at the boarding school between 1941 and 1947, stated that he could not say “everything that would be necessary to do justice to someone who lived through such experiences, to his despair, to his outbursts, to his desire for revenge. To give an idea, when invoking Goffman’s Asylums, prisons and convents, I could recall that the boarding school is only distinguished by differences of degree, in the series of 'total institutions', from instances such as prison, psychiatric hospitals, or even closer to the penitentiary colony as evoked by Jean Genet in The miracle of the rose” (p. 117). He then adds: “I believe that Flaubert was not wrong in thinking that, as he wrote in Memoirs of a Madman, “He who has been to boarding school knows almost everything in life at the age of twelve.”[1]
In the 1950s, writes Ágota Kristof, with the exception of a privileged few, everyone in Hungary was poor. She had only one pair of shoes, was cold at boarding school, and when her shoes broke, she had to pretend to be sick, staying in bed because she had nothing to wear, until the shoes returned from the shoemaker.
She doesn't give details, but in two lines she says that her father is in prison and she hasn't heard from him for years, while her mother works wherever she can – she says that she is in a cramped basement, sitting with ten other women around a large table, packing rat poison (p. 18-19).
3.
Ágota Kristof says that when she was 9 years old, she moved to a border town where at least a quarter of the population spoke German. “For us Hungarians, it was an enemy language, because it reminded us of Austrian rule, and it was also the language of the foreign soldiers who were occupying our country at that time. A year later, other foreign soldiers were occupying our country. Russian became a compulsory language in schools and other foreign languages were banned” (p. 22).
She had Russian classes at school, but no one really knew the language or had any interest in learning it. So when she arrived in Switzerland at the age of 21, in a city where French was spoken – a language she was completely unfamiliar with – that language also became an enemy language. But for another, more serious reason: “this language is killing my mother tongue” (p. 23).
It was – and still is – a painful learning experience: “I have spoken French for over 30 years, I have been writing for 20 years, but I still don’t know it. I can’t speak it without mistakes, and I can only write it with the help of a dictionary that I consult frequently” (p. 23).
It speaks of the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953 (a joy that had to be hidden) and of the essays they were forced to write to glorify him, when interned, and of the relief that almost everyone felt.
4.
There are touching pages dedicated to her escape from Hungary to Austria, on a November afternoon in 1956, with the help of a “coyote”. Her four-month-old daughter was sleeping in her father’s arms and she was carrying two bags: one with bottles, some diapers and changes of clothes for the little one; the other bag contained dictionaries (p. 30). After walking all night, they managed to reach a small Austrian town, were well received by the authorities, given shelter and food. They left their entire past life behind in Hungary, without saying goodbye to their parents and siblings (p. 32-33).
They are sent to Vienna, receive some money and food, and are housed in a large refugee center. Her husband spends his days in the offices of the various embassies, hoping to find a country that will welcome them. “Christmas is approaching and we take a train to Switzerland” (p. 36). They arrive in Lausanne. Little by little, the people begin to disperse and the three end up going to Neuchâtel, more precisely to Valangin, where they are housed in a two-room apartment furnished by the locals. “A few weeks later he starts working in a watch factory in Fontainemelon” (p. 39).
Life is getting back on track, but it is hard: she gets up at 5:6, breastfeeds, dresses the little girl and catches the 5:39 bus that takes her to the factory. She leaves the girl at daycare and starts work. She leaves at 40:XNUMX, picks up her daughter, does the shopping and comes home, lights the fire, prepares dinner, puts the child to bed, washes the dishes, writes a little and goes to sleep (p. XNUMX-XNUMX).
She writes poetry in the factory, because she finds the work monotonous. She takes notes, sketches something, and at night, at home, she rewrites and writes everything down in a notebook. There are 10 Hungarians who work in the factory. At lunchtime, they have difficulty eating, because they are not used to that food. For a year, she can only eat bread, coffee, and milk. In Switzerland, she is comfortable, but life is “without change, without surprise, without hope” (p. 40). She considers that exile is hard, that what she gains does not compensate for what she loses, “it is too high a price” (p. 41).
Two friends return to Hungary, knowing that they will be arrested for leaving the country illegally; two single men go to the United States and Canada; four others go even further afield – they kill themselves in the first two years of their exile. “One by means of sleeping pills, another by gassing, two others by hanging themselves. The youngest was 18 years old. Her name is Gisele” (p. 42).
“How does one become a writer?” is the title of the penultimate chapter. When she arrived in Switzerland, her chances of becoming a writer were almost nil. After many years, she finished two plays written in French and saw them performed by amateur groups (p. 43-44). A friend suggested that Ágota Kristof send her texts to the radio, and thus began her “radio” career: she was staged and received royalties from them – between 1978 and 1983, the French Swiss Radio produced five of her plays. In 1983, she went to work with the drama school of the Neuchâtel Cultural Center (p. 44).
He writes, writes, writes and sends one of his texts to three major French publishers. Gilles Carpentier, from Editions Seuil, agrees to publish it (p. 45-46). A few years later, The big notebook, his second novel, is published in Germany and in 17 other languages (p. 46).
5.
At the age of 27, she enrolled in a summer course at the University of Neuchâtel to learn to read, and two years later she obtained a certificate in French studies with excellent evaluations (p. 57). She comments on the difficulties she faced, as Hungarian is a phonetic language, while French is “the exact opposite” (p. 50).
Finally, she writes that she knows how to “read again”, having become “passionate about dictionaries” (p. 52). She knows that she will never be able to write in French like a native French writer, “but I will write as best I can, as I can” (p. 52). She adds that she did not choose French; this language was imposed on her by circumstances. “Writing in French is a necessity. It is a challenge. The challenge of an illiterate” (p. 52).
*Afrânio Catani He is a retired full professor at the Faculty of Education at USP and is currently a senior professor at the same institution.
Reference
Ágota Kristof. The illiterate. Translation: Prisca Agostini. New York, New York, 2024, 56 pages. [https://amzn.to/4igd3IW]
Note
[1] Pierre Bourdieu. Self-analysis outline. Translation: Sergio Miceli. New York, New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 120.
Jean Genet. The miracle of the Rose. Paris, Gallimard, 1945.
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