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Somebody singing something.
I don''t care: it''s not even pretty. The song is sad, and old, so old.
Written immediately before her acclaimed Notebook trilogy and selected by Ágota Kristof herself, I Don''t Care presents the Hungarian master at the height of her game. Harrowing yet delightfully whimsical, these short fictions oscillate between parables, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone. In Kristof''s world, cruelty abounds, but in a way that shifts the reader''s gaze to aspects of our shared reality, past and present, that one would not want to be without. The themes of exile and existential alienation are undeniable - as is the force of every sentence, making for extraordinary and essential reading that surprises at every turn.<>
About the author
Ágota Kristóf was born in Csikvánd, Hungary, in 1935. Aged twenty-one, Kristóf and her husband and four-month-old daughter fled the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Uprising to Austria and were resettled in French-speaking Switzerland. Working in a factory, Kristóf slowly learned the language of her adopted country. Her first novel, The Notebook (1986), won the European Prize for French literature and was translated into forty languages. Kristóf’s other work included plays and stories as well as The Proof (1988) and The Third Lie (1991), which complete the trilogy begun with The Notebook. She died in 2011.Chris Andrews was born in Newcastle, Australia, in 1962. He has translated Roberto Bolaño, César Aira, and Kaouther Adimi, and received the Valle-Inclán Prize and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for his translations. Andrews has published two collections of poems, Cut Lunch and Lime Green Chair, for which he won the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize.
