The Illiterate

"Sharp and precise as a surgeon’s blade, this compact memoir vividly evokes the author’s serialized displacements due to war and political oppression. A precocious reader in her native language, Ágota Kristóf was repeatedly rendered “illiterate” by historical circumstances: She had to absorb Russian as a child during the Soviet occupation of Hungary at the end of World War II, then she was forced to learn French when resettling in Switzerland after her escape from Hungary’s failed uprising against Soviet rule in 1956. Comparing her exile to “a desert,” Kristóf nevertheless survived the wilderness through hawklike observation of her social environment and a fierce survival instinct."