Ágota Kristóf

There’s a long piece (6,759 words) by Sarah Resnick in the new issue of the LRB on Ágota Kristóf, following the publication by Penguin last year of Kristóf’s slim book (96 pages) of short stories, I Don’t Care. Most of the piece is about Kristóf herself, and about the Notebook Trilogy – The Notebook (1986), followed by The Proof (1988) and The Third Lie (1991), which ‘secured her reputation as a major postwar author’. The Trilogy has been in print with CB editions for a more than a decade but the LRB has never reviewed a CBe book. Annoyingly, the LRB piece appears at a time when the Trilogy is not available – publication rights have moved from CBe to Penguin, who will publish in November, and meanwhile I’ve been told to stop selling the CBe edition and remove it from the website. But copies of the CBe edition of the Trilogy do exist – right here, in a box by my desk – and if you want a copy now, rather than wait until Penguin publish later in the year, please contact me.

Kristóf’s The Illiterate, also discussed in the LRB piece, is still available from CBe, which published the first English translation in 2014 and re-issued it in 2022. But not for long: Penguin now have the rights to that too, and I’ll soon have to stop selling the CBe edition.

In his introduction to the CBe edition of The Illiterate, Gabriel Josipovici notes that when Kristóf was aged fourteen and still living in Hungary (she fled to Switzerland in 1956), her father was imprisoned, ‘we must presume for falling foul of the Communist authorities’. Sarah Resnick writes well about all of Kristóf’s work and her piece is informed by recent research which found that Kristóf’s father was imprisoned not for political reasons but for the sexual abuse of children at the girls’ school where he taught. More on that here.