I Don't Care

June 10, 2024
In this mischievous and mournful story collection from Hungarian writer Kristóf (1935–2011), originally published in 2005 and translated into English for the first time, characters deal with homesickness, homicidal tendencies, and other maladies. At 15, the protagonist of “The House” is distraught when his family moves from his idyllic childhood home. As an adult, he hires an architect to reconstruct the house based on his memories, and is disheartened by the result (“I had a copy made. Ridiculous. As if you could copy what you once knew”). In “The Axe,” a woman calls the family doctor after her husband allegedly fell out of bed onto an axe, and the story’s dark joke—which is that obviously she killed him—remains funny all the way to the end. In “The Canal,” a dead man is led by a puma and an indifferent boy, who turns out to be his son, to an open sewer, where the puma explains that he will float for eternity. Uncertain filial piety also figures into “The Father,” in which a grieving son considers how he’s unable to carry out his late father’s last wishes. Each entry is coolly ironic and moves at a velocity that puts one in mind of Italo Calvino. Readers of modernist European fiction ought to snatch this up.