For a Didactic of Cruelty. The Know-how of Writing in Agota Kristof

Agota Kristof was born in Hungary, in 1935 but was forced to abandon her country for political reasons. She settled in Neuchatel, Switzerland in 1956 where she became a writer. In 1986 she published The Notebook, a little masterpiece of contemporary literature in French, translated into more than 30 languages. The great success of the book encouraged her to turn it into the first tome of a trilogy completed by two other volumes, The Proof (1989) and The Third Ly (1991). The aim of this article is to analyze the textual mechanisms of the enunciation of cruelty in The Notebook.