Bleak Intimacies

Katie Tobin reviews Hungarian author Ágota Kristóf’s story collection “I Don’t Care,” newly translated by Chris Andrews.

By Katie TobinSeptember 8, 2025

• Fiction

IN HIS 2006 FILM The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Slavoj Žižek describes a moment in the film Fight Club (1999) when Edward Norton’s unnamed—and, not incidentally, unhinged—narrator stages an elaborate workplace opera of self-harm. He throws himself around his boss’s office, bruising and bloodying himself, to create an impression of abuse. Žižek, never one to shy away from a perverse allegory, declares this a metaphor for liberation: “In order to attack the enemy, you have to beat the shit out of yourself—to get rid in yourself of that which attaches you to the conditions of society.” For Žižek, this masochism is the shape of revolution: self-annihilation as a prelude to political awakening.

I am cautious not to spend too long rhapsodizing about the real purpose of art, but I think we would do well to remember that enjoyable art—art we might find pleasurable in some way—can frequently depict squeamish and taboo subjects without asking us to endorse them ourselves. Take, for example, the films of Michael Haneke, recently screened throughout various London cinemas in a dedicated retrospective. Or Sarah Kane’s play 4.48 Psychosis, called a “75-minute suicide note” after its premiere in 2000, which has just been revived with the original creative team. It seems obvious that morbid art is having a moment. Then again, maybe it always is.

What’s the appeal, precisely, of art that offers no balm? I suspect it’s partly a bit of schadenfreude. There is, after all, a vicarious catharsis in watching other people in pain, a recognition that the pain on display is not entirely separate from our own. But beyond that, I think something more demanding is at work. Difficult art asks us not only to confront but also to remain in the presence of the parts of ourselves and our world that we usually try to suppress. It refuses resolution and denies us moral clarity.

Appropriately, one of Žižek’s favorite writers, the Hungarian-born playwright, poet, and novelist Ágota Kristóf, shares the philosopher’s commitment to unsparing confrontation: a willingness to depict cruelty and damage without offering redemption or relief. Of The Notebook (1986), her most infamous work, Žižek has claimed that it stirred in him “a cold and cruel passion”: the fantasy of acting ethically without the contaminating influence of empathy. “This is where I stand,” he confesses, “how I would love to be: an ethical monster without empathy, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of blind spontaneity and reflexive distance.”

Formally and in her treatment of character, it’s this distance that defines Kristóf’s work. In the titular story of I Don’t Care, a 2005 collection newly translated by Chris Andrews, two characters are introduced with the mechanical brevity of a stage direction: “One to ring the bell, one to punch the tickets.” Their roles are functional, their inner lives withheld. Kristóf’s other stories also wryly acknowledge their own formal minimalism, as when a music teacher mocks a student for playing too emotionally: “Feelings aren’t really valued in art these days.”

It would stand to reason, then, that Kristóf is a writer relatively uninterested in interiority. Her stories oscillate between vignettes and parables on the one hand and austere realism on the other, and are written in such a way that the author feels almost completely estranged from her subjects. It’s hard to imagine reading these 25 stories, some only a page or so long, isolated from one another. These are stories that gather force through repetition, their cruelty steady and matter-of-fact. 

Read this way, Kristóf’s humor lands with particular force. Full of absurd premises and offhand quips, the stories in I Don’t Care—spare as some are—feel ripe for adapting into film, bringing to mind the work of Yorgos Lanthimos or Lars von Trier. This is especially true of my favorite story, “Wrong Numbers,” which follows an emotionally repressed man who lies about his appearance to impress a woman who phones him by accident. (“There are lots of words I’m incapable of saying,” he explains. “For example: ‘exciting,’ ‘thrilling,’ ‘poetic,’ […] and so on. […] They make me feel ashamed, as if they were bad words, obscenities, like ‘shit,’ ‘bitch,’ ‘pig,’ ‘whore.’”) Also highly cinematic is “The Canal”—one of the collection’s more explicit allegories for industrialization and the false promise of communism—in which a man returns to his childhood town in search of his son, only to find that the place has been rebuilt in gold, a gleaming monument to progress that renders everything, and everyone, interchangeable. “Have there been murders?” a man asks a talking puma of this new, “one of a kind […] nightmare city.” The cat retorts: “Yes. All that is carried away by the clear water of redemption.”

Exchanges like these reveal Kristóf’s sharp attentiveness to the limits of language, particularly in expressing the intensity and breadth of human emotion. All the more reason that this edition’s title feels like a slight misstep. Translator friends assure me that the original title, C’est égal, is a phrase whose meaning shifts, depending on context, between neutrality, resignation, and dismissal; it can suggest a kind of weary indifference (“whatever”) or a flat, exhausted neutrality (“I don’t mind”). By contrast, “I don’t care” sounds sulky and adolescent. It’s hard to imagine an adult saying it aloud without irony, let alone in the affectless deadpan that runs through most of Kristóf’s prose.

The title’s (mis)translation might seem at first like a small flattening, but in a body of work so attuned to what can’t be said outright, that loss of ambiguity isn’t insignificant. Born in rural Hungary in 1935, the author fled the country after the 1956 uprising and spent the rest of her life in Switzerland writing in French, a language she described as an “enemy” in her 2004 memoir, The Illiterate (tr. Nina Bogin, 2014). “I arrive in a city where French is spoken,” she writes. “I confront a language that is totally unknown to me. It is here that my battle to conquer this language begins, a long and arduous battle that will last my entire life.” That battle was, in time, lost or surrendered to: she consigned her mother tongue to a slow and merciless death and began reluctantly to write in French, with the help of a dictionary.

As in Kristóf’s other works, exiles of one kind or another recur throughout I Don’t Care. In “I Think,” one of the collection’s bleakest offerings, the narrator begins by telling us that they have “little hope left now.” What follows is a short inventory of abjection: a dirty flat and a life shorn of emotional attachment. The mental image of a man scanning stock prices in the paper makes the narrator physically sick, the vomit blocking the sink. They go out, briefly, to clear their head, only to return to the same unbearable house. “I don’t want to go back home,” they say. Abstracted from its original context, this statement is a useful primer for the collection’s central thesis: the impossibility of return, of inhabiting anywhere that doesn’t seem to demand the subject’s erasure.

Kristóf’s figuration of urban spaces is always desolate and empty, like the city in “The Canal” or the village in “A Northbound Train,” whose once-active station now lies abandoned. Yet Kristóf’s antipathy feels most pronounced in “About a City,” a story that describes a place “small and quiet, with squat houses and narrow streets; it had no particular beauty.” Against the almost incidental signs of life—dense piles of autumn leaves, churchyard gardens—the city registers as a place stripped of charm and emptied of meaning. But the countryside is no refuge either. Another story describes a quaint farm overtaken by the construction of a six-lane highway, which has replaced quiet with a continuous low hum. As per the story’s opening line, “it was becoming unbearable.”

Although Kristóf never explicitly expressed any Marxist sympathies in her work—unsurprisingly, given that her formative years were shaped by the violence and disillusionment of a Soviet-backed regime—I think there is a case for (cautiously) reading I Don’t Care as proletarian literature. Kristóf’s stories do not concern themselves with class consciousness as such, but they return again and again to the slow violence of labor, and the deep unfreedom of life under both capitalism and state socialism. For example, “Death of a Worker” (a title that practically begs to be read as a socialist epitaph) tells of several laborers diagnosed with cancer after working in a factory that “manufacture[s] corpses.” The phrase is devastating in its precision: the factory produces death both as product and by-product. The narrator of the subsequent story, “The Writer,” claims he has no personal life beyond his civil service job—a grim testament to being fully absorbed by the state.

Kristóf knew this life well from her own experience. After fleeing Hungary in 1956, she was funneled—one of 10 refugees—into work at a Swiss clock factory. She recounts in The Illiterate how her life consisted of waking before dawn to catch a bus, dropping her baby at the factory crèche, surviving a shift on coffee and bread, then returning home to cook and sleep. She called this existence “the desert”—a social void, engineered by work, that empties out subjectivity. Years after the fact, she recalls that two of the 10 exiles returned to Hungary and were imprisoned; four others killed themselves.

In reading this, I am reminded of a quote from Shulamith Firestone’s classic 1970 polemic The Dialectic of Sex: “[A] factory job is no man’s idea of heaven either, even if it is preferable to woman’s caged hell.” Firestone’s own acerbic 1998 collection Airless Spaces has recently been given new life in reissue, and her intransigent rejection of the family unit offers a jagged analogue to Kristóf’s own bleak intimacies. In “The Axe,” a woman tells a doctor that her husband fell from the bed onto an axe during his sleep; “At Home” is another dream of escape, of a home that has never existed, “because it was never [a home], not really.” Only in “The Product” does a narrator finally get away, taking her children and leaving her abusive husband behind.

If anything is to be gleaned from the few women who actually speak in I Don’t Care, it’s that what most of these stories profess to “care” about—and care about deeply, almost embarrassingly so—is reunion. These are narratives full of weary travelers, war veterans, prodigal daughters, and ghosts with good intentions, all making doomed pilgrimages back to something resembling home. For Kristóf’s mothers and wives, this return often means reentering a world that offers little in the way of recognition or relief. Yet still, they stay. They labor like factory workers. They yield to men and to institutions that will never love them back. But sometimes they speak. And when they do speak, Kristóf’s female characters voice a conflict—between the life they might want and the roles they’ve been taught to accept. What emerges is not a straightforward rejection but a slow, accumulating dissatisfaction—a need, however tentative, to find a language of their own.