Da igual

A woman explains to the doctor that her husband split his skull with an ax when he fell out of bed. A boy checks his mailbox twice a day waiting for a letter from his parents who abandoned him at birth. A lonely man entertains himself by answering the constant phone calls that he receives by mistake. On the birthday of a housewife, her husband insists on taking care of all the preparations for the party. Another woman regrets that she never walked hand in hand with her father while she was on her way to her funeral. Agota Kristof collected in Doesn't matter twenty-five stories that he had written since he went into exile from his native Hungary and took refuge in Switzerland, where he had to learn to speak, read and write in a language that was not his own, as he explains in his autobiographical account The illiterate (published in 2004, just a year before these stories). Thus, these are the first texts of him written in French, which he kept quiet for decades, still unsure of his vocabulary and his style, but beset by the urgent need to write. They are very short stories bathed in a strange and disturbing atmosphere, like revealing nightmares, which corroborate Kristof's vision of the world as an unsafe, hostile place, in which misfortune can manifest itself at any moment. This meticulous and clinical description of evil runs through practically all of his literary production, and here it is exposed to us without intermediation, with the facts in the nude. Family conflicts, childhood traumas, outbreaks of madness, lethal decisions... It doesn't matter, nothing matters, life is that ruthless and no one can change it. Although perhaps, after all, there is some room for compassion and tenderness.