Scritte in ungherese negli anni giovanili, queste poesie andarono perdute nel 1956, quando Agota Kristof fu costretta a lasciare l’Ungheria per ritirarsi in Svizzera, a Neuchâtel. Negli ultimi anni il dispiacere per la perdita di quei versi a lei così cari e fonte di ispirazione per tante prose scritte in anni più recenti spinse l’autrice a ricercarli nella memoria e a riscriverli in ungherese. A quelle poesie ne aggiunse altre, scritte direttamente in francese in età adulta. Nasce così Chiodi, una raccolta di componimenti in cui si trovano i temi ben noti ai fedeli lettori dei romanzi e dei racconti di Agota Kristof – lo smarrimento, la perdita, l’esilio, il ricordo dell’amore, l’attesa, il desiderio – ma che qui, nell’immediatezza della poesia, sembrano raggiungere un grado di intensità ancora maggiore.
Author
Ágota Kristóf was a Hungarian writer, who lived in Switzerland and wrote in French. Kristof received the European prize for French literature for The Notebook (1986). She won the 2001 Gottfried Keller Award in Switzerland and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 2008. Kristof's first steps as a writer were in the realm of poetry and theater (John et Joe, Un rat qui passe), which is a facet of her works that did not have as great an impact as her trilogy. In 1986 Kristof’s first novel, The Notebook appeared. It was the beginning of a moving trilogy. The sequel titled The Proof came 2 years later. The third part was published in 1991 under the title The Third Lie. The most important themes of this trilogy are war and destruction, love and loneliness, promiscuous, desperate, and attention-seeking sexual encounters, desire and loss, truth and fiction. She has received the European prize for French literature for The Notebook. This novel was translated in more than 30 languages. In 1995 she published a new novel, Yesterday. Kristof also wrote a book called L'analphabète (in English The Illiterate) and published in 2004. This is an autobiographical text. It explores her love of reading as a young child, and we travel with her to boarding school, and over the border to Austria, and then to Switzerland. Forced to leave her country due to the failure of the anti-communist rebellion, she hopes for a better life in Zurich. The majority of her works were published by Editions du Seuil in Paris. She has two new short stories published at Mini Zoe collection entitled "Ou es-tu Mathias" and "Line, le temps". The names Mathias and Line are from her previous novels. She died on 27 July 2011 in her Neuchâtel home.
