The illiterate woman

Maintaining on the one hand, in an exquisite balance, a refined and incisive writing style, and on the other, a deeply poetic style (a characteristic that runs throughout her work), Agota Kristof reveals to us, in The Illiterate, the key moments of her life.

From a minimum number of episodes explored in a few pages, she thus concentrates the literary material, in each chapter, with the lethality and precision of a demolition weapon. Agota Kristof is, here, a witness to her experience – from early childhood to the onset of old age. 

She is marked by the war, the flight from her country, the separation from her family, survival as a refugee in Switzerland, and, above all, the irreparable separation from her mother tongue, Hungarian, and the permanent struggle, which will last a lifetime, to master French, that “enemy” language that left her illiterate again, at twenty-one years old, and which was mainly responsible for gradually annihilating her mother tongue.

Agota Kristof was born in Hungary in 1935. She died in Switzerland in 2011. She wrote her entire body of work in French.