SKIMMING

What's wrong with skimming, with being superficial? says Rosalie in Yiyun Li's story, 'Wednesday's Child'?, as she waits for a train in Amsterdam. She has other radical ideas about reading. Couldn't we excise books, like unwanted DNA, she asks. Wanting another opinion, she gave Agota Kristof's Trilogy to her fifteen year-old daughter, Marcie, who soon afterwards walked under a train.

She wished there had been more time for Marcie to skim on the surface of her life. What's wrong with being superficial? With depth always comes pain.

That's why we go on holiday, where the greatest depth you can have is to sit on a rock by the Meeting of the Waters, on a still, quiet day, drinking liquorice tea looking down through the water at coins thrown in for luck or protection, and across the water to the elegant little bridge and the weir we came through with the canoe circa 1992, holding onto a rope to slow our passage through the rushing water. 

The difficulty with waiting, Rosalie thought, is that one can rarely wait in absolute stillness. Absolute stillness?—that part of herself which was in the habit of questioning her own thoughts as they occurred, raised a mental eyebrow. No one waits in absolute stillness, absolute stillness is death; and when you're dead you no longer wait for anything.

The day before I read 'Wednesday's Child', I spent an hour or so skimming Faces in the Water by Janet Frame, a slightly fictionalised account of the years spent in mental institutions. Skimming was all I felt like doing that day. I didn't want to go any deeper or take any longer than that. Which is perhaps why Yiyun Li's story made its impact.

The Illiterate, Agota Kristof

The start of The Illiterate by Agota Kristof fits my case.

I read. It is like a disease. I read everything that comes to hand, everything that meets my glance: newspapers, schoolbooks, posters, bits of paper found on the street, recipes, children's books. Everything in print.

Growing up I read the back of the cornflakes packet, the fru grain tin, insects in the long grass, the back of my hand.

I am four years old. The war has just begun.

 How do you become a writer? she asks. 

First of all, naturally, you must write. Then, you must continue to write. Even when it doesn't interest anyone.

A slim book in the Spring is worth double. Birch are in their early green. The dark night of the soul is over. 

If ever.

There's room in a spare tale for all of us. Reading Agota Kristof makes me write as she does. There are a thousand entrances on every page. We can all settle in with our own bare bones. 

One kind of writing exists because, for various reasons, there is no one to say it to. ( Ruskin)

Agota Kristof, Trilogy

Do I have to come to Spain to remember I can read in french? For a few days with my old friend Annette in Puerto Banus (Port of Abuse, as the judge would have it) I took with me Agota Kristof's trilogy, which I haven't read since I first did, in the nineties. The familiar foreignness, the edge of french, brings the sense of isolation and retreat that I cherish on beaches. To be alone and warm turning over and back in your space in the sand, your reading senses are acute. Before I even got to the beach I'd read much of the first volume on the plane. In fact, each volume I read so fast that, in order to save some for later, I dipped about in what I'd read to find again what was so astounding. You can read and reread, turn over and back in the sun, and still not know. This is beyond knowing.

Agota Kristof learned french after escaping to Neuchâtel from Hungary in 1956; her french is clear as a bell, frightening, almost, the french you learn in Switzerland when you have escaped from seismic politicks and deep chill at the age of twenty-one.

Her french sounds as if it has been recently learned, under pressure and with relief, by children at school. The lessons her resilient twins set themselves in Le Grand Cahier, volume 1, are frightening in any language.

Exercice d'endurcissement du corps
Exercice d'endurcissement de l'esprit
Exercice de mendicité
Exercice de cécité et de surdité
Exercice de jeûne
Exercice de cruauté

It's a relief to read such decisive coverage of the human condition. Talk about home schooling. This is self-schooling in a totalitarian state, a state of incomprehension. Claus and Lucas, whose names are renditions of each other, are relentless in their push for the evenness of truth, all of which they record in the eponymous grand cahier. Their identity shifts but not their absolute loneliness or their absolute devotion to each successive situation in which they find themselves. In your own grand cahier you do not have to tell the truth, though that might be your avowed intent; in fact, by definition, you're already lying.

These are some other chapter headings.

L'hiver
Le chantage
Notre premier spectacle
En prison
La fuite
L'incendie
La séparation

The twins have a scrupulous ethical position at all times. Frightening as other autonomous children in literature, they're more more stark than enfants terribles, they have less style, more brink, more chill. Language always stops short. Scene after scene, no comment, no feeling. We are suddenly dependent on feeling now that it's not there, now that it is an indulgence no one can afford.

Volume 2, L'épreuve, is more episodic. Tales are told. People arrive and then disappear. Just as the reader starts to know a person or a situation, everything changes, the person disappears, by her own hand or his, the situation changes, everyone is face on to loss which ever way you look. The twins are now in two different unnamed countries. Agota Kristof as she reads is in two different countries, Hungary and Switzerland. As I read I am on the beach in Puerto Banus amid the whine of jet skis and the savour of factor 50; I am in my room at home in County Cork listening to Mozart. You are wherever you are and wherever you were before or would like to be.

By Volume 3, Le troisième mensonge, the third lie, the narrative is fractal, as it has to be in a totalitarian state. Through the eyes of characters we think are the ones we've known all along, we see earlier versions: the child who lives with his grandmother at the edge of town, and plays harmonica in cafés; the deaf boy; the limping boy; the boy whose father or whose mother is dead, perhaps. Handsome boy, handsome girl, similar age, half sister or no relation. Every relationship is there to be fractured—by death, by accident, murder, suicide, escape.

The twins of Volume 1 are not united in Volume 3, we're not in the realm of satisfactory endings. Claus is now Klaus, and orthographically no longer inside the spelling of Lucas. There may not have been any twins in the first place, they were a fable, the two sides of a thwarted intimacy. It doesn't read like a tease of our expectations, it reads like mortal confusion, irresolvable loss, of identity, family and future.

Strong stuff for the beach. My ethical position, reading Agota Kristof on the beach, is clear: leave me be, leave me to think to the sound of the sea and then turn over. Almost total detachment from where I am, but hardly escapist.