" It is forbidden to write: 'The Little Town is beautiful', because the Little Town can be beautiful to us and ugly to someone else. "

The brothers develop their own brutal morality, mostly based on the great need of a human being at any given point, but devoid of any compassion, really.

When we come back with the food and blanket, he says: 'You're very kind.'

We say: 'We weren't trying to be kind. We've brought you these things because you absolutely need them. That's all.'

It's very compelling to read. Slavoj Zizek wrote this about the book, which I do not relate to but still you can see how it's interesting:

This is where I stand, 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, helping others while avoiding their disgusting proximity. With more people like this, the world would have been a pleasant place in which sentimentality would be replaced by a cold and cruel passion.

No one seems to talk a lot about the pornographic stuff. As the violence is treated matter of factly, the child sexual abuse and rape is treated erotically some of the time. Maybe I can't say that actually. I am thinking for example of the passage about a maimed girl's death:

 “She called them. She went out on the road and waved at them to come in. There were twelve or fifteen of them. And as they took her, she kept shouting: ‘Oh, I’m so happy, I’m so happy! Come, all of you, come on, another one, again, another one!’ She died happy, fucked to death.”

Or the brothers, on request, pissing on a soldier's face for his sexual gratification, the idea being that it's a neutral act for them and they don't mind fulfilling it, since he has otherwise been kind to them and is not interfering with anyone's right to exist, which seems to be the real basis of their moral framework.

Here is an excerpt from an interview with Agota Kristof on the piss passage in particular:

RB: Why did you think of a foreign officer, homosexual and masochistic?

AK: The officer really existed. It was in our apartment. There were three rooms, one of those had a separate entrance, and during the war it was always occupied. First by Hungarians, then by Germans, and finally by Russians. But the officer, no, he wasn’t a pedophile. That’s nothing but an invention, but it isn’t there in order to shock the public. Not at all. If I hadn’t included that, everyone would be able to read it, even children, which I would prefer. This detail prevents lots of people from reading the book, and because of that I regret it.

RB: But the officer loved them?

AK: Yes, it is true, the officer loved them.

It's not clear to me here why it was included, then, if not to shock, but probably she doesn't know why exactly, which is the right answer anyway. Also this is like the least of the child sexual incidents so not sure what she means about children being able to read the book if not for this passage, that is genuinely a funny thing for her to say. I liked this interview with her, she keeps testing the interviewer on whether he has read all her work and also lol:

RB: Do you agree with the definition according to which a novel must be based on the incompatibility between the individual and the world around her?

AK: I don’t know. I don’t think about things like that.

I was thinking about this sort of thing, brutality in fiction -- back in the day I took a real dislike to that book the Painted Bird for the reason that it was a cheap and endless onslaught of pornographic sexual violence, a lot of it against children. I remember a review of that book:

"Since the realism of German genocidal practices does not suit the sexual sadist very well, as it is a kind of industrialized slaughterhouse, and not an orgiastic panopticum, there comes to the rescue of authenticity the pseudologia pornographica.... This book, as a bestseller, received positive opinions from famous critics; what was abominable in it was interpreted as 'delirium' and 'phantasmagoria' of its child protagonist... even some of our compatriots who realized that it was a lampoon were ready to see a certain greatness in The Painted Bird, due to its boundless boldness and violence."

To me Kristof's trilogy has much more literary merit than the Painted Bird, but still, I have a bit of this same reaction. I am not sure how to feel about the placement of this sort of thing over and over again in works I otherwise find really effective. There are all these tragic and beautiful elements of brotherhood and morality and how to tell the story of your life in this book.

Possibly I am too pregnant to have read this. There are certain things I simply don't have the stomach for now, things I take personally which I should not.

Anyway, truly worth reading, especially if your second language is French, it is a very easy book to read (in terms of comprehension I mean), I can't comment on the English translation ,though this sort of thing would translate perfectly well.