A review by notoriousesr
The Illiterate by Gabriel Josipovici, Ágota Kristóf, Nina Bogin

challenging reflective fast-paced

4.0

 Ágota Kristóf left her native Hungary as a young woman, escaping the Soviet dictatorship with her husband and baby as a refugee. In this slim volume, she discusses with characteristic bluntness the difficulties of living and working as a writer in your non-native language.

As an English teacher in a country where English is not a primary language of communication, this book gave me so much to think about; my work is primarily about helping students overcome difficulties they have producing English. Though I don’t speak French or Hungarian, constantly butting up against the limits of your ability in a second language is something I’m intimately familiar with, even as a relatively privileged English-speaker. Kristóf’s frank, unembellished style particularly drives her point home because it made me question how much of her style was a product of her struggles with “the enemy” language (French). This memoir is quite short, but it still wrestles with difficult questions of linguistic assimilation. 4 out of 5 enemy languages.