Synopsis
Twin brothers, left with their evil grandmother at a time when war has blurred all distinctions between good and evil, learn to steal and kill in the name of survival and create their own loveless morality
Review
‘In its odd, memorable, unique way, The Notebook is a masterpiece.’
John Self, Asylum
‘ The Notebook is a great book, in the absolute. ‘
Beverley Bie Brahic, TLS Books of the year
‘ Every now and again you read a book by an unknown author and you know immediately that you are in the company of greatness. That is a rare and precious feeling. It happened to me when, a few years ago, a friend sent me a copy of Agota Kristof s first novel, Le Grand Cahier (The Notebook). The utter simplicity of the style, the clarity, the unflinching gaze at a world far removed from any I had experienced and yet curiously familiar that of a peasant culture on the border of what we take to be Hungary and Germany in the dying moments of World War II and the deep humanity underlying it all, took my breath away. ‘
Gabriel Josipovici
Nothing I ve read this year has affected or disturbed me as greatly as CB editions timely reissue of The Notebook by Agota Kristof ... Kristof s chilling indictment of totalitarianism in all its forms reads like an alternative and equally dread-inducing eastern European Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both stylistically inventive and politically incisive, this is a book to worry readers for years.
Eimear McBride, Financial Times (June 2014)
'Louring over Agota Kristof s entire narrative is the shadow of war, occupoation and the ambivalent experience of liberation for the liberated. The twins survive by rejecting traditional notions of identity and social order. Like a pair of self-realised Nietzchean Supermen, they make themsleves of the earth, driven by the need to preserve rather than service the flesh, uninterested in abstract or unquantifiable concepts such as love or the divine. With survivial as their guiding principle, they become monsters of distilled, unsentimental humanity and, by the shocking climax, invulnerable even to what has hitherto seemed their own impregnable bond.’
Eimear McBride, Times Literary Supplement
'The title alludes to the Big Notebook of secret diary entries kept by young twins during the tail end of an unnamed war in an unspecified country. Their mother evacuates them from the Big Town, which is under siege, and deposits them at their grandmother s house on the edge of the Little Town ...The boys have their own set of skewed values but just when the reader believes they have displayed some sign of humanity, they jolt you with new heights of pathological cruelty. In this land devoid of moral agency, riven by nameless foreign armies, deportations, forced disappearances, air raids and liberators , they clinically record their exploits in the Big Notebook kept hidden in the attic. The aim of these strict composition exercises is to set down a record unadorned by opinion or information superfluous to a straight record of fact. It is the spare nature of the narrative that sets up The Notebook s most grimly humorous moments and makes it such a compelling read.[br]
Most shocking are the accounts of the twins hare-lipped young neighbour, who is so starved of intimacy that she indulges in bestiality, later to die happy, fucked to death by a gang of foreign soldiers. When the twins mother is killed by a shell blast, they bury her in the garden where she fell but later dig her up, polish her bones, re-articulate the skeleton with wire and hang it from a beam in the attic. The Notebook is a transfixing house of horrors.’[br]- James Tennant, New Statesman
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