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Here, in English at last, is a collection of Ágota Kristóf's short―sometimes very short―stories, which she selected herself, translated by the peerless Chris Andrews.
Written immediately before her masterful trilogy (The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie), Kristof's short fictions oscillate between parable, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone, often returning to the theme of exile: the twin impossibilities of returning home and of reconstructing home elsewhere.
The world of the book has very hard edges: cruelty is almost omnipresent, peace and consolation are scarce. Austere and minimalist, but with a poetic force that shifts the walls in the reader's mind, Kristof's penetrating short fictions make for extraordinary and essential reading.
"In this mischievous and mournful story collection from Hungarian writer Kristóf (1935–2011), originally published in 2005 and translated into English for the first time, characters deal with homesickness, homicidal tendencies, and other maladies...Each entry is coolly ironic and moves at a velocity that puts one in mind of Italo Calvino. Readers of modernist European fiction ought to snatch this up." —Publishers Weekly
"Many of Kristóf's stark vignettes, reported in unflinching detail...have a cool, disturbing power―part documentary-like, part surreal―that is fierce and distinctive." ―Kirkus Reviews
"Kristóf's sentences are like skeletons, commemorations of indescribable sadness that have been meticulously scrubbed of gore and gristle. She seems to sculpt her stories by omission―one might think of Kristóf's fiction as an act of recuperation, an expression of loss that preserves loss in the form." ―The New Yorker
"Kristóf's writing shows us both the pleasure and the necessity of literary refraction." ―The Nation
This information about I Don't Care was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ágota Kristóf (1935-2011) was born in Csikvánd, Hungary. Her first novel, The Notebook, won the European Prize for French literature and was translated into forty languages.
The poet and translator Chris Andrews has won the Valle Inclan Prize and the French-American Translation Prize for his work.
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