THE NOTEBOOK TRILOGY

A brooding portrait of lives lived without morals, originally published in three volumes: The Notebook (1988), The Proof (1991), and The Third Lie (1996).

A woman arrives in a backwater village from “the Big Town” with two young boys, twins. She informs an old woman living at a house on the outskirts that the boys, refugees from the bombing back home, are her grandsons. “People call her the Witch,” recounts one of them. “She calls us ‘sons of a bitch.’” Grandmother has a point. In a world consumed by war—the time, never mentioned, is World War II, the setting transparently the author’s native Hungary—the boys have few feelings for anyone but each other. They’re brilliant: “They’re too advanced for their age,” their father says. “They know too much.” As if on the way to becoming Nietzschean supermen, they condition themselves to endure violence by beating each other senseless. They practice violence on others, too. One victim is a randy housekeeper who taunts a prisoner bound for a concentration camp, earning her a bullet that hits her full in the face. Questioned by the police, Lucas and Claus—we don’t learn their anagrammatic names for scores of pages—respond bluntly, “People are cruel. They like to kill. It’s war that has taught them that.” Others fall, too: Mother and a newborn baby, not sired by Father, are killed by a wayward shell. Father dies when Claus leads him to a minefield on the frontier, then crosses into the west and freedom. Left to his own devices in their now-dead grandmother’s home, Lucas indulges most of the other mortal sins. Kristóf’s relentlessly grim, matter-of-fact story nicely bookends The Painted Bird and The Tin Drum, although the last volume in the trilogy is perplexing, calling into question much that has happened earlier and ending on a tentative but fittingly bleak note.

A skillfully told, exceedingly strange work in which existential despair is one of the brighter moods.