The monster

With this edition, we gain access, for the first time in Portuguese, to a pivotal part of Agota Kristof's literature – theatre. Although she has written in several literary genres since adolescence, it is theatre that marks the beginning of Kristof's literary career. Her plays are first performed in small cafés in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

From the outset, she deals with the essential themes of the rest of her literary work: borders, identity, violence, solitude. Her brief, concise, relentless style begins to take shape here in her writing for theatre, where spatial and temporal references are practically eliminated. In some plays, she includes the indication "can be performed without scenery", and avoids references that might distract the audience or place them in a specific context.

Through her writing for theatre, Kristof offers us a lucid and cruel vision of a world dominated by violence and isolation. The protagonists are anti-heroes who inspire no compassion, empathy, or sympathy, only unease and incomprehension.

If we had to sum up her theatre (and the entirety of her work) in a single theme, it would certainly be the border, which cannot and must not be crossed. When a character dares to do so, it triggers a mechanism of unpredictable consequences.

In The Monster, ending the Monster and the border that defines it leads to the annihilation of the village. In The Road, one of the writer's favourite plays – who declared herself an enemy of automobiles – roads, like borders, tear the world apart. The border is equally present in The Epidemic and The Atonement, functioning as a ghost that advances with the irrepressible desire to conquer new territories from humans (both external and internal).

Agota Kristof produced a total of twenty-four plays. Some of her most famous plays were published for the first time by Éditions du Seuil in 1998.

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