Fantasy Twins: When the Ordinary Becomes the Weird

Reading Ágota Kristóf's The Phantom Twins is like entering a forest on a foggy afternoon, where the most ordinary things become bizarre.

Ágota Kristóf's Fantasy Twins

You don't know what's real and what's fake. And you probably won't know by the time you reach the last page.

Continuously puzzle the reader

The work The Magic Twins (translated by Hieu Tan) is a trilogy of novels including The Big Book , Evidence and The Third Lie published in 1986, 1988 and 1991.

The trilogy of novels is connected through a pair of "twins" from when "they" were children living in a remote village, until "they" lost each other, grew up, and experienced many life events.

Write "they" in quotes because Kristóf keeps puzzling the reader.

At first, in The Big Book, the story is told in the first person, “we,” from the perspective of two twins who are inseparable. Only at the end, when it is decided that one must go and one must stay, do the twins still seem very real.

In The Third Evidence and Lie , this truth gradually shakes. Ágota Kristóf throws out one fact and then throws out another fact that negates the previous one. In this way, the reader seems to be teased by the author herself, led into a maze, and every time we think we are about to find a way out, the author deliberately makes us lose our way.

The Power of Creativity

In The Craft of Writing Novels (translated by Nguyen Hong Anh), Murakami Haruki recounts that when he first started writing, he wrote in English and then translated it into Japanese himself.

He compares himself to the case of Ágota Kristóf: "But by using a foreign language to compose, she succeeded in creating her own new style.

The rhythm is harmonious in combining short sentences, the use of straightforward words without beating around the bush, the description is precise and unpretentious. Just like that, not writing anything grand, has a mysterious feeling as if deliberately hidden.

Ultimately, Ágota Kristóf, while not trying to convince her readers to believe in anything she writes, makes them believe in the power of creation. The power to reconstruct a history in a person's life, a history that is ambiguous, hidden, and has buried so many individuals under the mists of time.

From The Big Book to The Evidence and The Third Lie , Ágota Kristóf's writing style also changed. She was born in Hungary and moved to Switzerland in her early twenties.

The trilogy The Twins was written in French – which was still Kristóf's second language at the time. The Big Book features short, direct passages, unlike the two later works.

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HUYNH TRONG KHANG

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/cap-song-sinh-ky-ao-khi-nhung-thu-binh-thuong-cung-thanh-ky-quai-20250726234109731.htm