London Review Bookshop Podcast Camilla Grudova & Jennifer Hodgson: Ágota Kristóf’s ‘I Don’t Care’
Apr 4, 2026
Jennifer Hodgson, a literary scholar who maps Ágota Kristóf in modernist letters, and Camilla Grudova, a Canadian writer of surreal fiction, explore Kristóf’s exile, her choice to write in French, and the dark, fairytale-like motifs in her newly translated short stories. They read passages, discuss factory work’s impact, and trace themes of estrangement, death, and grotesque imagery.
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Kristóf's Harrowing Refugee Crossing
- Ágota Kristóf fled Hungary in 1956 with her husband and four-month-old daughter, crossing mountains with a smuggler and other refugees.
- Camilla Grudova reads Kristóf's memoir passage describing a dead child found at the Swiss border, which triggers Kristóf's remembered crossing with her newborn and two bags, one of dictionaries.
Factory Labor Shaped Kristóf's Stark Prose
- Kristóf's repetitive watch-factory work shaped her prose voice by providing time to think while enforcing mechanical monotony.
- In excerpts read by Jennifer Hodgson Kristóf describes piercing the same hole for ten years and calls the factory a place that 'also produces corpses', linking labor's dullness to existential bleakness.
French Became A Deliberate Exile Language
- Kristóf learned French as an exile, taking five years to speak and 12 to write, and consciously used it to distance herself from traumatic memories.
- Both speakers note she wrote plays first, then radio, then the novel Notebook (1986), and her French is described as an 'enemy language' that 'is killing my mother tongue.'
