Illiterate

Narrated in a series of brief vignettes and translated into English for the first time, The Illiterate is Agota Kristof s memoir of her childhood, her escape from Hungary in 1956 with her husband and small child, her early years working in factories in Switzerland, and the writing of her first novel, The Notebook. From the introduction by Gabriel Josipovici: This story of exile and loss, of how, for the refugee, the country in which she eventually settles, however kind and well-meaning its inhabitants, will always be a poor and inadequate substitute for the country of one s birth, its language always an alien thing, however proficient she becomes in it this is the story of so many people today that it is perhaps the story of our time, and Agota Kristof should perhaps be seen as our transnational bard.