In November​ 1956, a few weeks after Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest, a 21-year-old Ágota Kristóf and her husband, Janos Béri, decided to leave their home in Kőszeg, in north-west Hungary. Kristóf wasn’t really involved in politics, but Béri, who had taken part in the uprising against Mátyás Rákosi’s Stalinist government, had already been arrested once and, as a known dissident, feared the prison sentence that almost certainly awaited him. With a childhood friend as their guide, Béri and Kristóf trekked through the forest on the Austrian border under cover of darkness. Béri carried their four-month-old daughter, Zsuzsanna, a bottle in her mouth to keep her from crying, and Kristóf two bags, one filled with nappies, bottles and baby clothes, the other with German dictionaries. When the family emerged from the woods, they were in Austria. The couple wanted to stay there, hoping to return to Hungary once the political situation had calmed down, but instead they ended up in Valangin, a tiny Swiss village in the canton of Neuchâtel. Settling there wasn’t a choice, Kristóf would later say, it was chance, the workings of international bureaucracy.

On arriving in Neuchâtel Kristóf didn’t speak a word of French. She carried on writing in Hungarian, but in time she came to see this as a dead end; if she wanted to be read – by her friends, her children, her neighbours – she would have to write in the language of her new home. In 1984, the year she turned 49, she sent the manuscript of a novel to three publishers in Paris. An editor at Seuil took a chance on the unknown author and her severe, macabre story of twin boys in a war-ravaged adult world. The Notebook, published in 1986, became a bestseller. In translation it achieved cult status: in Tokyo in the early 1990s, according to one newspaper, young clubbers carried it around ‘like a talisman’. Two sequels, The Proof (1988) and The Third Lie (1991), secured her reputation as a major postwar author.

The three novels in the Notebook trilogy, and a fourth, Yesterday (1996), were based on Kristóf’s memories of Hungary during a tumultuous period. She was candid about the fact that many of the scenes of extreme violence, sexual abuse, incest and other horrors depicted in her books were taken from life. But she also maintained that the novels were not strictly autobiographical; they were loyal to her feelings, but deviated from events as they transpired. Consciously or not, this seems to have been a form of self-protection. As Kristóf set out to write down one story – what she called ‘my story’ – she ended up with something transformed. Her protagonists, too, are always trying and failing to record the story of their lives. ‘I try to write true stories,’ one of the twins says at the start of The Third Lie, ‘but … at a given point the story becomes unbearable because of its very truth, and then I have to change it.’ French was a help; although she called it an ‘enemy language’, no different from the German and Russian imposed on her as a child by Hungary’s occupying forces, it also allowed her to ‘put distance between my fears and my writing’.

For a writer whose books stay close to her own experiences, Kristóf remains an enigmatic figure. Piecing together the facts of her life is no easy task. There is no biography in any language, no collection of correspondence. She didn’t do the things many novelists do, such as review books or write essays; didn’t conform to the expectations for immigrant writers by translating the work of other Hungarian authors or promoting their work; didn’t socialise much with other writers. She kept diaries but couldn’t bring herself to reread them, and burned them before she died.

Kristóf’s one book of autobiographical writing, The Illiterate (2004), brought together eleven columns for the Swiss-German magazine Du, which she wrote while working on The Third Lie. It begins with her childhood and ends with the publication of The Notebook, staying close to the events that shaped her as a writer. At around fifty pages, The Illiterate is a singularly restrained memoir, withholding even seemingly innocuous details, such as the name of her mother or father or the town in which she was born. This is in keeping with Kristóf’s fiction, which never identifies its setting and often features unnamed characters. The many interviews Kristóf gave help to fill in some of the gaps, but even in these she is laconic, her answers sometimes no more than a few words long. In print this makes her seem terse and forbidding, an impression informed by the austerity of her writing. Her television appearances reveal someone more genial, if no more forthcoming. ‘I see your sparkling eyes,’ one interviewer observed, a little disarmed because ‘that’s not the image one has of Ágota Kristóf.’

More recently, Kristóf’s growing reputation in Hungary has helped to shed light on her early life. Although the entire trilogy was translated into Hungarian by 1996, Kristóf has rarely been claimed as a Hungarian writer because she wrote in French. It was only after her death in 2011, and the release in 2013 of János Szász’s film adaptation of The Notebook, that Hungarian scholarship on her work really took off.

The Kristóf who emerges from the sources was, like the twins in the Notebook trilogy, a person divided in two. In Hungary were her parents and her two brothers, the journals she’d kept as an adolescent, her earliest poems, her first language, the memories that formed the basis for her fiction. In Switzerland were her two marriages, her three children, her adopted tongue, the books she published. The past, her childhood, this part of herself she felt slipping from her grasp, became an obsession that never waned. In Hungary she had lived; in Switzerland she wrote. For Kristóf, the two were nearly incompatible. ‘Writing prevents me from living,’ she said in 1996. ‘It’s almost suicidal.’

She was born in 1935, in Csikvánd, a dusty, one-road village in the west of the country, with no electricity or running water, and no telephone or train station. Her father, Kálmán, the only teacher in the village, taught primary school children in a schoolhouse on the family property. Her mother, Antónia, who had also trained as a teacher, oversaw the innumerable household chores. Some of Kristóf’s earliest memories, as she wrote in The Illiterate, were of smells: ‘chalk, ink, paper, calm, silence and snow’ in her father’s classroom; ‘slaughtered animals, boiled meat, milk, jam, bread, wet laundry, baby’s pee, agitation, noise, and summer heat’ in her mother’s kitchen. She was four when she learned to read, and soon she was telling stories of her own, elaborate sagas with ‘good characters and evil ones, poor and rich, winners and losers’.

In 1944, the family moved to Kőszeg, near the Austrian border, where Kálmán had got a new teaching job. Kristóf later compared the experience to ‘arriving in America’: in Csikvánd there was one small grocer’s; Kőszeg had bakeries, butchers, other conveniences. The Wehrmacht invaded that March, and as the front moved nearer schools were closed. Kristóf and her two brothers – in particular her older brother, Yano – spent long days roaming Kőszeg’s streets and admiring its colourful architecture. Their father, the family disciplinarian, was away at the front, and his absence made possible an experience of freedom rare for children so young. A haze of nostalgia hangs over Kristóf’s childhood – ‘my favourite times’, she called them, elsewhere picking enfant as her favourite word – and her fondness for the final year of the war can raise an eyebrow. ‘I only have good memories,’ she reflected in 2001. In reality, Kőszeg became a site of various horrors: the city’s Jews were deported to Auschwitz, sick labourers were gassed at a work camp and, after the fascist Arrow Cross party came to power in late 1944, thousands of Jewish forced labourers were brought in to build fortifications along the border with Austria, many of whom ended up shot and buried in mass graves. It’s not that Kristóf was unaware of the war, or didn’t feel its effects. She and her brothers faced cold and hunger, and witnessed the expulsion of Jews. But the closeness they developed, the unfamiliar freedom they shared, was what abided. ‘Collective misfortunes,’ she observed, ‘mark you less than the personal ones.’

The years that followed were also brutal – the Soviets invaded, the war ended, Rákosi’s Stalinist government gained power – but Kristóf had almost nothing to say about them in her memoir or in interviews. Something in the family had gone wrong, though; as Kristóf writes in The Illiterate, one by one the three children were sent off to state-run boarding schools, and ‘strangers’ had moved into the ‘family home’. Kristóf says she was fourteen when she arrived in Szombathely, at the school she described as ‘somewhere between a barracks and a convent, between an orphanage and a reform school’, with its cold-water taps, unheated rooms and dogmatic Communist education. Antónia briefly lived in the same town as her daughter, packaging rat poison in a dark basement.

A single line in The Illiterate hints at what had brought this about: her father was in prison. In his introduction to the English-language edition, Gabriel Josipovici speculates that Kristóf’s father was jailed for ‘falling foul of the Communist authorities’. Other critics have suggested the same. In 2018, however, the historian Mónika Mátay discovered that Kálmán was accused in October 1948 of abusing pupils – one of them as young as seven – at the girls’ school where he taught. He confessed, news reports said at the time, and served four and a half years. According to Kristóf’s younger brother, Attila, who was also a novelist, Antónia’s refusal to divorce Kálmán made her unemployable, forcing her to look for work outside the town. When Yano was old enough to be sent to boarding school, Ágota and Attila lived alone at home under the supervision of their next-door neighbour, and Antónia came back at weekends. Attila said that she never forgave her husband, though in public she stood by him, and the family claimed that the charges had been fabricated.

Kristóf described her years in Szombathely as ‘the bad times’. She had been separated from her brothers and her parents; the ‘silver thread of childhood’ had been ‘severed’. It was to cope with her despair that she began writing: poems, their ‘phrases are born out of the night’, and a journal for which she invented a ‘secret handwriting’. Yet she was hardly solitary. She served as leader of her school’s Young Pioneers, convinced that the Soviet regime, with its ‘beautiful’ ideas about equality, was ‘extraordinary’. She also started developing comic sketches, which she rehearsed and performed with friends. In Russian classes she was introduced to authors who would make a ‘big impression’ on her: Gorky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. She left school in 1954. She had planned to go to university; instead, she married Béri, her history teacher, who was ten years her senior. In Kőszeg, Kristóf worked as a weaver at a textile manufacturer, then at a pastry shop. Béri promised that in time they would move to Budapest, where she could study literature, but the uprising in 1956 upended their plans.

By her own account, Kristóf’s first years in Switzerland were dismal. Once more she was denied the opportunity to study; instead it was Béri who went to university, retraining as a biologist. Kristóf got a job at a clock factory, where she spent long, dreary days in front of a pedal-operated machine, punching the same hole in the same part. Her new life seemed a lot like the old one, only worse. She was lonely in Valangin. She struggled to communicate with her fellow workers, who tried to help her with the basics, touching her hair to teach her the word for hair, her arm for arm – lessons that took place in the toilets, or during a smoking break, away from the noisy machines. The one benefit of the job was that it required almost nothing from her mind, leaving her free to think about poetry. During the day she scribbled lines on loose sheets of paper she kept in a drawer: the poems she’d left in Hungary but kept in her head; new ones accented by the ‘regular rhythm’ of the factory machines. At night she took them home and copied them into a notebook.

Kristóf left Béri in the early 1960s. She had given up her life in Hungary for him, and never forgave him for his decision to study while she worked. It was around this time that she began publishing her poems in émigré journals – first in the London-based Irodalmi Újság, and later in the more avant-garde Magyar Műhely, which was based in Paris. By then she was able to speak but not read French – the ‘illiteracy’ she claimed in her memoir – and when, in 1962, she was offered a scholarship to study the language, she decided to quit her job. Within two years she was reading Voltaire, Hugo, Camus and Sartre, and Americans like Faulkner and Hemingway in translation. Late in life she claimed she ‘wasn’t much influenced’ by the French classics, saying that she found Proust ‘too boring’. Yet it was through reading French authors – looking up unfamiliar words, copying passages into her journals – that she mastered the language. ‘Tirelessly, I go and look,’ she wrote in The Illiterate. ‘I develop a passion for the dictionary.’ After 1967 she stopped publishing in Hungarian.

In​ the late 1960s Kristóf began translating her Hungarian poems into French, telling herself that it was only a ‘game’ to test how well she knew the language. One form of translation spawned another: Kristóf recast the verse as prose, the poems as miniature stories. She kept going and started writing stories from scratch, more than thirty in total. A selection of these – along with a few stories based on the Hungarian poems – was published nearly forty years later as C’est égal (2005), which has now appeared in an elegant English translation by Chris Andrews with the title I Don’t Care. The stories have the brevity of poems or folk tales. Some are surreal, with fantastical beings, while others are more realist, their portrayals of relationships and family life punctuated with black humour. Together they show that from an early stage Kristóf was concerned with the themes that run through her novels: exile, loss, childhood, separation, death. They also reveal a writer experimenting with a new style. In interviews in the 1990s and 2000s, Kristóf often dismissed her early Hungarian poems as ‘too sentimental, too florid’, and claimed that the Notebook trilogy marked a deliberate break from these earlier works (‘I’d had enough [of emotions] … I chose to write in a dry style’). These stories suggest that she started rethinking her approach much earlier. Schoolchildren torture their teachers (‘The Teachers’); a personified death, alternately flattering and menacing, stalks a future victim (‘The Big Wheel’); dinner guests are served a stewed hare that is in fact their own cat (‘I Have Given Up Eating’). Comparing this last story to the Hungarian poem, which I read in French, reveals the original to be a more mournful reflection on nostalgia and disappointment; the cat features only in Kristóf’s French rewrite.

When, in ‘The Streets’, a music student expresses ‘sensual, physical, almost obscene love’ for his childhood town, the students laugh, and it’s as if Kristóf is dramatising the conflict between her own feelings – she too is obsessed with her childhood town – and the kind of art she wants to make. ‘Feelings aren’t really valued in art these days,’ the teacher warns. The narrator in ‘Wrong Numbers’ likens the words ‘exciting’, ‘poetic’, ‘suffering’ and ‘solitude’ to ‘obscenities’ he can’t bring himself to say, just as Kristóf would later declare her ‘disgust’ at sentimentality. She didn’t try to publish the stories, though she would later repurpose a few: the puma sequence in ‘The Canal’ appears in The Third Lie, and almost all of ‘I Think’ in Yesterday.

In the early 1970s, Kristóf more or less abandoned the form when she began writing plays. A novel remained too daunting, but she felt that drama was something she could attempt – had already attempted, in fact, since some of her stories took the form of monologues (‘The Axe’) and dialogues (‘My Sister Line, My Brother Lanoé’). She finished her first two plays, Un rat qui passe and John et Joe, in 1972. John et Joe, about two middle-aged idlers and the lottery ticket passed between them, was performed first, in 1975, at a dinner theatre in Neuchâtel. In many ways it’s an outlier: the dialogue shares the absurdity of her later plays – ‘Mustard without a sandwich isn’t ham,’ Joe says – but the scenario has none of the callousness, the flashes of grim violence. The equally absurdist Un rat qui passe, with its notes of extreme pessimism, is more representative of Kristóf’s later work. A judge, his room transformed into a prison cell, is forced to confront his past selves as he ponders whether to carry out the orders of the authoritarian government. To do so means condemning innocent people to death; to resist would invite his own death, and make way for someone else to carry out the orders instead. Either way the innocents won’t be saved, and the regime will go on as it was.

Kristóf wrote more than twenty plays, most of them between 1972 and 1982; five were produced for radio. The similarity of her name to Agatha Christie’s elicited enough confusion that she started signing the works Zaik, the maiden name of her Czech maternal grandmother. One reason she was so productive, by her own account, was that she’d stopped working. She was now married to a Swiss photographer, Jean-Pierre Baillod, and stayed at home to care for their two young children, Carine and Julien. (Baillod and the children, including Zsuzsanna, spoke only French – another reason for Kristóf to adopt the language as her own.) She was a devoted mother but as a ‘housewife’, she said, she didn’t excel. According to Kristóf, Baillod expected his wife to knit and make jam, and he frowned on the way she spent her time. They divorced sometime around 1980. Two unhappy unions – having ‘to work, take care of the children, do everything without any help’ – were enough to keep her from marrying again. ‘The worst part about my life was my husbands,’ she said a few years before she died.

Bad husbands turn up in Kristóf’s early work. In the short story ‘The Invitation’, a man offers to plan a party for his wife then wheedles her into completing the preparations; in the radio play La Clé de l’ascenseur, a man takes from his wife her ability to walk, see and hear, all under the guise of protecting her. Her characterisations of marriage might suggest that she felt an affinity with other women writers coming up at the same time, such as Annie Ernaux and Marguerite Duras in France and Monique Laederach and Anne-Lise Grobéty in Switzerland. She did not. ‘I don’t like women’s books,’ she said in 2004. ‘They go on about marriage, divorce, emotional states, children’; their authors have ‘nothing to say’. When asked to name a book she liked by a woman, she picked Magda Szabó’s The Door, claiming: ‘She’s not just talking about herself.’ In her novels, Kristóf would talk about but never reveal herself. In her view feelings were rendered more powerfully – more truthfully – through action rather than thought, and her novels display both her commitment to a hard-edged exteriority and the virtues of that approach.

Kristóf​ began work on The Notebook in the early 1980s. At first she thought of it not as a novel but as a collection of lightly fictionalised reminiscences about her first year in Kőszeg, when she and Yano had roamed freely through the town. In the early drafts Kristóf began her sentences with variations on ‘mon frère et moi’ or ‘mon frère dit … moi je dis …’ but this felt too ‘cumbersome’. She decided to switch to the first person plural and to make the siblings twin boys. This introduced to the story all the gothic resonances and fraught identity questions that twins bring, amplified by her decision never to separate them: they always speak and act as one.

The Notebook opens in wartime. After travelling all night from the Big Town, where bombs are falling, the nameless school-age twins have been brought by Mother to a house in the Little Town, on the edge of a forest. Beyond it is a secret military base and, further on, the frontier. Fearing for their safety, Mother leaves her children with a woman who is fiendish and foul-mouthed, her head covered with a black shawl, her face with ‘wrinkles, brown spots and warts that sprout hairs’. By relation she is the boys’ maternal grandmother, but in every other regard she is a stranger. The townspeople call her the Witch. Grandmother calls the twins ‘sons of a bitch’. She beats and insults them and assigns them chores in exchange for food: ‘We take heavy buckets full of pigfeed … We take the goats to the edge of the stream … We go and gather wood in the forest.’ Quickly they learn what it feels like to be cold and dirty and hungry.

There are traces of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ in the opening scenes: the destitute parent who abandons her children, the hag who takes them in, the unnamed towns and could-be-anywhere rustic landscape. Yet Kristóf’s story, which follows the twins over the final year of the war, becomes stranger and more unsettling than a Grimm tale. It’s not Grandmother whom the twins should fear but the world outside their door. All around them adults behave badly. There’s a duplicitous priest who sexually abuses an impoverished young girl and a lewd housekeeper who ‘strokes and kisses’ the boys then ‘sucks [their] penises’. A ‘foreign officer’, a boarder at Grandmother’s, inducts the twins into his masochistic fantasies. The boys witness charred bodies piled in ‘four tall black pyres’ in a work camp and soldiers leading a ‘human herd’ to their deaths. Even the darkest fairy tales conceal wonder in the mundane; in ‘Hansel and Gretel’, a duck turns out to be a getaway boat, a house a confection made of bread and cake and sugar. The Notebook is simply grim all the way through.

With a notebook they acquire from the local bookseller, the twins set out to record what is ‘true’ – and by ‘true’ they mean objective. This isn’t some abstract wish, but a practice with rigid rules. They can’t write ‘Grandmother is like a witch,’ but they can write ‘People call Grandmother the Witch.’ They can’t write ‘The orderly is nice,’ but they can write ‘The orderly has given us some blankets.’ They can’t write that they ‘love Mother’ because the words for feelings are too ‘vague’; saying you ‘love walnuts’ doesn’t mean the same things as saying you ‘love Mother’. It’s ‘the description of objects, human beings and oneself’, ‘the faithful description of facts’, that they’re after. This notebook, we learn, is the same one we are reading, which means the twins’ rules for writing are also Kristóf’s, an internal justification for prose that recounts an outing to buy warm boots with the same dispassion as the discovery of a dead body (‘He is still in one piece, only his eyes missing because of the crows’).

Like monks who learn to tolerate pain by focusing on it rather than blocking it out, the twins practise suffering to better withstand it. Here is ‘Exercise to Toughen the Body’:

We are naked. We hit one another with a belt. At each blow we say:

‘It doesn’t hurt.’

We hit harder, harder and harder.

We put our hands over a flame. We cut our thighs, our arms, our chests with a knife and pour alcohol on our wounds. Each time we say:

‘It doesn’t hurt.’

After a while, we really don’t feel anything any more.

They fast to habituate themselves to hunger (‘Exercise in Fasting’) and insult each other to become desensitised to hurtful words (‘Exercise to Toughen the Mind’). They repeat happy memories, phrases their mother used to say like ‘My darlings! My loves!’, until these lose all meaning. The endurance ‘exercises’ are of a piece with the rules for writing: the twins could lose themselves in a world of their own imagination, as some children might do in such circumstances, but the rigid order they establish forces them to take on the world as it is.

The Notebook is about the ways war turns morality into an obstacle to survival. The same exercises that inoculate the twins from harm also erode their ability to feel the emotions that help guide our behaviour: empathy, shame, fear, guilt. Soon they begin to practise a kind of vigilantism, based at first on ‘absolute need’ (they blackmail the priest to get him to provide for his victim), and eventually on retribution (they punish the housekeeper for taunting a starving prisoner with food). Is there a moral distinction between what the twins do in the name of ‘justice’ and the actions of everyone else, who seem driven by self-interest? Should we judge the twins differently because they are children? Kristóf poses but doesn’t answer these questions. By the close of the novel, they almost cease to matter. It’s five years after the end of the war and the ‘Liberators’ of the country are now its oppressors, controlling the government, the army and the border, which is ‘surrounded by barbed wire’. When the twins lure a man to his death, deploying him as a sacrificial decoy, the only motive appears to be opportunistic self-gain. It’s a devastating moment: the twins have become no different from the adults around them.

Kristóf originally envisioned The Notebook as a stand-alone novel. In the final scene, one twin makes a dash across the border, into the free world, leaving the other behind. How could the story continue? But she realised she wasn’t ready to abandon the twins. ‘I couldn’t do anything else,’ she told an interviewer. Where The Notebook strives for truth, both The Proof and The Third Lie explore truth’s degradation; where it captures the intensity of the sibling bond, the subsequent novels underscore the pain of loss and separation.

The Proof picks up where The Notebook left off, as the twin who stayed behind returns to an empty home. With the narrative now in the third person, the novel stays close to him. For the first time he has a name, Lucas, and an age, fifteen, although Kristóf quickly pushes the story five years into the future with bouts of unexplained illness and lapses in memory. The strange, vertiginous atmosphere marks a change from The Notebook’s exactness, and fits the repression, secrecy and paranoia that have taken hold of the town. Lucas gets by as a gardener and finds companionship with other townspeople on the margins, their lives stamped by grief. Clara, a librarian tasked with destroying banned books, aches for her husband, who was hanged; Michael, an insomniac, for his wife, who was also murdered by the state. The disgraced Yasmine feels the loss of her imprisoned father, whose child, Mathias, she has given birth to. Lucas tries to bring some good to their lives, and even cares for Mathias as he would a son, but is undone by his own surges of brutality. The destruction brought on by cruelty in The Notebook may imply a need for something like love, but The Proof refutes that possibility: here love kills almost as surely.

Like his friends, Lucas too is grieving. He hasn’t heard from his brother, Claus (an anagram), since his departure but sees him everywhere: ‘In my room, in the garden, walking beside me in the street. He speaks to me.’ Lucas speaks back by writing in the notebook, anticipating his brother’s eventual return. Reading the first novel, one question that comes up is whether the twins have observed their own rule. An objective style, free from evaluative adjectives and adverbs, similes and metaphors, doesn’t guarantee the absence of falsehood. In The Proof Kristóf brings this doubt to the surface. What if Claus is an invention? That’s what Lucas’s friend Peter believes, and as party secretary he is well positioned to know: he makes speeches, understands the difference between saying one thing and believing another. No one asks after Claus, not the priest the twins visited as children, not even the bookseller, Victor, from whom they acquired their notebooks. The notebooks provide the sole evidence of Claus’s existence and the twins’ lives together – until the final chapter, when Kristóf introduces a ‘report’ from the authorities that throws into doubt everything that preceded it.

The Third Lie is a deconstruction of the first two novels. Like them, it opens in the small town, but the Party is no longer in power and the border is now open. The twins here are called Lucas and Klaus, and they have been separated since the age of four, following a violent domestic episode. Lucas, who narrates the first half of the book, has just returned to his home country after nearly forty years abroad, in search of his brother. As he recounts the events of his youth, the broad contours of his story echo those of the earlier novels: during the war he was brought by a nun to a border town to live with a woman he called Grandmother. There he ‘worked from morning till night’, bought a notebook and, after Grandmother’s death, slipped into a neighbouring country. Characters from The Proof turn up in his account – Peter, Clara, the bookseller – but play different roles or have changed genders.

The second half of the book is narrated by Klaus. He spent the war in the care of his father’s former lover, Antonia, and her daughter, Sarah, his half-sister. As much as Lucas is desperate to reunite with Klaus, Klaus is set on keeping Lucas away. His return after decades of silence threatens their mother’s fragile health and Klaus’s independence. If we take The Third Lie at its word, the stories in the previous novels were fictions invented by Lucas. But should we trust this account? When Lucas remarks that he writes ‘made-up things. Stories that aren’t true, but might be,’ is the book we are reading among them? The novel’s title, at least, suggests it might be.

Kristóf initially planned to set The Third Lie in a city based on Neuchâtel and to recount the journey of the brother who left, as she herself had. But the Little Town, or the town of K, as it was called by the third book, summoned her back. There was no question for Kristóf that this place was Kőszeg. She allowed her Italian and Portuguese publishers to bring out the books in one volume as ‘The Trilogy of the Town of K’, acknowledging Kőszeg’s role as a principal character. This Kőszeg, which emerges as a kind of abyss, is incongruous with the idyll for which Kristóf seemed, outwardly, to be so nostalgic. It was the ‘only city’, she once said, ‘where life would have been possible’. In an interview in 1996, she explained that ‘it’s all I have left of my childhood.’ Writing fiction seems to have cleared the mist from her memories, revealing a different kind of truth, one that aligned more closely to the history she had lived through. But some truths remained obscured. In a late interview Kristóf cited Lucas’s words in The Third Lie to describe her own writing process: ‘I try to tell my story but all of a sudden I can’t – I don’t have the courage, it hurts too much. And so I embellish everything and describe things not as they happened but the way I wish they had happened.’

In all three novels the father character is murdered – by the twins in the first two (he’s the man they send ahead at the border), by their mother in the third. For Lucas the events of The Notebook were a fantasy invented ‘to endure the unbearable solitude’. Seen the same way, in The Notebook a historical trauma could be standing in for a personal one. ‘This is just literature,’ Kristóf wrote on the back of one of her drafts. ‘I haven’t yet said what really happened – the truth is something I could never tell.’

After completing​ the trilogy, Kristóf again tried to put her experience of exile into a novel and this time succeeded. Yesterday was the work of fiction she called her ‘most autobiographical’. The narrator, Sandor, is an immigrant from a ‘nameless village in an insignificant country’ who gets up at 5 a.m., takes the bus to a job at a clock factory, writes in the evenings and suffers the disillusionment experienced by Kristóf and the other refugees she encountered in Switzerland, four of whom killed themselves (as do four of the refugee characters in the novel). Early on, Sandor himself attempts suicide. Kristóf has no comfort to offer: the fellowship that at first united the refugees begins to break apart. Despair is contagious, and the community too fragile to withstand it.

Yesterday is at core a love story. Sandor is infatuated with a woman from his childhood called Line and wants to marry her; she loves him too. But in Kristóf’s work romantic love tends to sit aslant in some way or be tainted by taboo. (‘Love stories aren’t worth writing about,’ she once said. ‘They’re banal.’) Early on we learn that Sandor and Line share a father, who had a long, illicit relationship with Sandor’s mother. (In an echo of the trilogy, it’s after Sandor’s attempt to kill his father that he runs from home and eventually over the border.) Sandor knows that he and Line are half-siblings but Line is unaware of her father’s affair, and Sandor keeps it from her.

Incest is a recurring theme in Kristóf’s fiction. The parties involved tend not to experience it as a form of abuse. Nor does Kristóf, so averse to psychological depth, use it to examine her characters’ feelings. These relationships may be unsettling, but they never appear gratuitous, intended simply to shock. In The Proof, Yasmine describes her sexual encounters with her father as consensual; she was a teenager when they started having sex, and each lusted equally after the other. In The Third Lie, the mutual desire of Klaus and his half-sister, Sarah, is wadded in the innocence of childhood exploration. Sandor remains unconflicted about his feelings towards his half-sibling. ‘I’ve heard or read somewhere that the pharaohs regarded the marriage of brother and sister as the ideal marriage,’ he says. ‘I think so too.’ It’s logistics, the impossibility of being alone together, that keep him from sleeping with Line.

Incest in these novels breeds misfortune. Line loses both her daughter (in a custody negotiation) and an unborn child (in a coerced abortion). Yasmine is murdered. Victor, the bookseller in The Proof, kills his elder sister, with whom he had sex as a child, and is then executed for his crime. He is the only character in Kristóf’s work who takes an adverse view of his own incestuous relationship: his sister’s advances, he says, ‘shocked me more deeply than she could ever imagine’.

It isn’t known whether Kristóf was one of her father’s victims. But his crimes hover over these storylines. When asked to account for her fascination with the subject, Kristóf said, ‘I always loved my older brother. I thought he was the ideal man. Until my first marriage, and for some time afterwards, I was in love with him. That may be one reason.’ The shrug of uncertainty in her response was in many ways typical. Kristóf found speaking about her books ‘difficult’. Her reluctance can on occasion read as resentment, but more often as bafflement about the workings of her own mind. ‘It wasn’t deliberate, it just came out like that’ is an explanation she sometimes offered.

Kristóf’s books recognise human passions as dark things that can ensnare anyone. We have social norms, moral codes, to protect us, but these are fragile and can be disrupted – by war, for one. Her willingness to present, without judgment, people acting on their worst impulses has sometimes made her work controversial. This has played out on a customary battleground – school classrooms – as parents allege that the books are harmful to their adolescent children. The most notorious incident occurred in 2000, in Abbeville in northern France, when a literature teacher who had been teaching The Notebook was arrested in his classroom on suspicion of distributing pornography. He was never charged, but the arrest sparked protests, petitions and a one-day strike by teachers in the region. When Kristóf eventually weighed in on the events, she was unapologetic. ‘Many secondary schools include the book in their curricula,’ she said. ‘As children, in Hungary, we talked about sex all the time. That’s part of being at war.’ More recently a woman from Kőszeg launched a campaign against the ‘sexual perversions’ in Kristóf’s novels, calling for an 18-plus rating on the books and their removal from reading lists in European schools. As much as protecting children, she claims she is seeking justice for Kálmán Kristóf’s victims and their descendants, as if Ágota should be held responsible for his actions.

In 2004, shortly after the publication of The Illiterate, the critic Claire Devarrieux broached the subject of Kálmán’s imprisonment with Kristóf. She wriggled out of answering. ‘I don’t really want to talk about it because it will be in my next book,’ she said. This was Aglaé dans les champs. Set in Csikvánd, the village where she was born, the book would tell the story of a ‘young girl who falls in love with an adult’. It was inspired, she said, by her own infatuation with the local pastor, a friend of her father’s, when she was six. According to Kristóf, the pastor had told her he’d marry her – when she was much older, of course – then went ahead and married someone else. This came as a shock. If a pastor could lie, surely, then, other men could lie too – or worse. It’s an odd story and a little hard to take at its word, not least because Kristóf claimed she never again loved anyone as deeply.

One can only speculate about how the novel might have related to her father’s arrest – did the story take a turn? – or if she even meant to include him at all. By the 2000s she was ill and too exhausted to do much writing. ‘I have some friends, I go out very little, I watch lots of television, read the newspaper, a few books too,’ she said in 2006. ‘I make visits to my children, and they visit me.’ Literature was something she’d ‘gone off’. Although she held on to the draft of Aglaé dans les champs long after depositing her other manuscripts with the Swiss Literary Archive, it was still unfinished when she died in July 2011, aged 75.