I Don't Care

Never before translated short stories by the legendary Ágota Kristóf 
 
'One of the 20th century's greatest writers' Camilla Grudova 
'Pure genius' Max Porter 
 
I don’t care: it’s not even pretty. The song is sad, and old, so old. 
 
I Don't Care presents the best short fiction by the Hungarian master Ágota Kristóf, selected by the author herself and available in English for the first time. Written immediately before her acclaimed Notebook trilogy, the works here oscillate between parables, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone. By turns harrowing and whimsical, cruel and sharply funny, Kristóf’s world shifts our gaze to a shared reality, past and present. Here exile and existential alienation are undeniable – as is the force of every sentence, making for extraordinary and essential reading. 
 
Translated from French by Chris Andrews

At a short story level, Kristóf – one of the 20th century’s great writers – reminds us what startling potential and transcendental power the form holds. The stories in I Don’t Care are fairytales from a strange and illuminating landscape

These stories are timeless stark fables – catnip for a readership that has developed a taste for existential angst

The stories in I Don’t Care by Ágota Kristóf might examine a small moment minutely or tell a person’s whole life in a handful of words… Fantastic

Her descriptions – of those with whom she escaped and whose sense of isolation eventually leads them back to Hungary even at the cost of their lives, as well as those whose sense of despair brings them to suicide – offer an uncomfortable insight into the extreme vulnerability of those obliged to seek asylum abroad

Mischievous and mournful… moves at a velocity that puts one in mind of Italo Calvino. Readers of modernist European fiction ought to snatch this up

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

For Kristóf, fiction is the only thing that might provide an escape from solitude... Her novels likewise lead to an engagement with the world. They open things up because of how they undermine what we consider to be true; they shatter a supposed unity. Kristóf’s writing shows us both the pleasure and the necessity of literary refraction

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, the great unspoken throughout her books being Hungarian. One might think of Kristóf’s fiction as an act of recuperation, an expression of loss that preserves loss in the form

I don’t care: it’s not even pretty. The song is sad, and old, so old. 
 
I Don’t Care presents the best short fiction by the Hungarian master Ágota Kristóf, selected by the author herself and available in English for the first time. Written immediately before her acclaimed Notebook trilogy, the works here oscillate between parables, surrealist anecdotes and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone. By turns harrowing and whimsical, cruel and sharply funny, Kristóf’s world shifts our gaze to a shared reality, past and present. Here exile and existential alienation are undeniable – as is the force of every sentence, making for extraordinary and essential reading. 
 
Translated by Chris Andrews

Ágota Kristóf (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 (Translator) 
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.

I don’t care: it’s not even pretty. The song is sad, and old, so old. 
 
I Don't Care presents the best short fiction by the Hungarian master Ágota Kristóf, selected by the author herself and available in English for the first time. Written immediately before her acclaimed Notebook trilogy, the works here oscillate between parables, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone. By turns harrowing and whimsical, cruel and sharply funny, Kristóf’s world shifts our gaze to a shared reality, past and present. Here exile and existential alienation are undeniable – as is the force of every sentence, making for extraordinary and essential reading.

Ágota Kristóf

Alan Sheridan

David Watson

Brutal, laconic, haunting … it argues for the necessity of stories in the midst of tragedy

A book through which I discovered what kind of a person I really want to be ... awoke in me a cold and cruel passion

Both stylistically inventive and politically incisive

A stunning, brutal and beautifully written (and translated) book

Kristóf’s sentences are like . . . skeletons, commemorations of indescribable sadness that have been meticulously scrubbed of gore and gristle

Closing this chillingly unsentimental novel, I felt that it had contrived to say absolutely everything about the Second World War and its aftermath in Central Europe

A haunting, harrowing tale that lingers in the imagination long after you’ve turned the last page

An almost lyrical intensity . . . fierce and disturbing

Every now and again you read a book by an unknown author and you know immediately that you are in the company of greatness . . . The utter simplicity of the style, the clarity, the unflinching gaze at a world far removed from any I had experienced and yet curiously familiar … and the deep humanity underlying it all, took my breath away

Sent to a remote village to live with their grandmother, twins Claus and Lucas devise physical and mental exercises to render themselves invulnerable to the ongoing horrors of war and living under a totalitarian regime. When their bond is tested, their collective ‘we’ shatters and the boys become isolated in different countries. Lucas is challenged to prove his identity and that of his missing brother, a defector to ‘the other side’. 
 
Kristóf’s haunting and unforgettable masterpiece has been an international phenomenon ever since its first publication in French 40 years ago. Distilling the brutally fracturing effects of war and displacement onto identity and memory, and our need for stories in our search for unity and meaning, The Notebook Trilogy is stark fable of timeless relevance.

Ágota Kristóf

Praise for The Notebook Trilogy

Brutal, laconic, haunting … it argues for the necessity of stories in the midst of tragedy

A book through which I discovered what kind of a person I really want to be ... awoke in me a cold and cruel passion

A great book, in the absolute

Brutal, laconic, haunting … it argues for the necessity of stories in the midst of tragedy

A book through which I discovered what kind of a person I really want to be ... awoke in me a cold and cruel passion

A great book, in the absolute

Brutal, laconic, haunting … it argues for the necessity of stories in the midst of tragedy

A book through which I discovered what kind of a person I really want to be ... awoke in me a cold and cruel passion

A great book, in the absolute

Books by Ágota Kristóf

Series by Ágota Kristóf

Penguin International Writers

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter