I've finally found it. My North Star.
The debut that makes me say, from the bottom of my heart, "This is the kind of first novel I want to write!" It's Agota Kristof's The Notebook. Here's the short version of why: she wrote it in a language she couldn't fully command, so she cut everything she couldn't say well. What was left is the most powerful prose I've read in years.
Confession: I bought this book at Book-Off, a Japanese secondhand chain, for 70 yen. That's about fifty cents. Then I let it sit on my shelf, unread, for years. Gathering dust in a corner.
The moment I finished it, I said out loud, "Why didn't I read this sooner?"
Then again, I try to go easy on myself. Without the 100 Debuts project, it might've stayed asleep on that shelf forever. So maybe it all worked out.
The last book I covered, Story of the Eye, was a banned book, published underground and seized by the police. The Notebook took the opposite road. After its release, it spread slowly by word of mouth, and before anyone noticed, it was a bestseller.
It earned that success. It's ridiculously gripping, the kind of book that sells itself.
A Novel That Resets Your Brain Like a Sauna
"Isn't it a war novel? Won't it be heavy and exhausting?"
That's what I assumed before I started. But the whole time I was reading, I felt this strange sense of release. What was it? I searched for something similar and finally landed on it.
A sauna.
Heat. Cold plunge. Fresh air. Then that light-headed, everything-reset feeling the Japanese call totonou. With every page I turned, my brain settled a little more. It's a kind of trip.
When I break it down as a writer, here's what's causing it:
- Prose so raw it's almost brutal
- No emotional description at all
- No proper names
- A rough, flat rhythm, tapped out one beat at a time
All of it blends together and drags you into a hypnotic world you can't climb out of.
And above all, this is a war novel. In wartime, one moment of hesitation can get you killed. So the twin protagonists never hesitate. Once they decide, they act.
Yet underneath, they're kind. They share food with the girl next door and her family. They quietly help people in trouble.
To be kind, you have to be tough. This novel teaches that without a single sermon. You feel it in your body.
The Notebook Written by "We"
"Okay, so what's it actually about?"
I don't want to spoil anything, so just the setup. Somewhere near the front lines, in a village that's never named, twin boys are left with their grandmother. They're our narrators.
From beginning to end, they only ever call themselves "we."
First-person plural. As a writer, I think that's a stunning invention. It's not "I," and it's not "they." Two kids, one pair of eyes, one voice. You can't fully identify with either twin, and you can't escape from either one.
On top of that, to teach themselves to write, the twins turn their daily lives into compositions and copy them into a large notebook. They have one rule. Don't write what you feel. Write only what you see and what happens, only the facts.
The contents of that notebook are the novel itself.
Hmm. The premise is the reason for the style. Have you ever seen a smarter trick?
The twins live in garbage-heap squalor and beat each other. They stab themselves with knives and pour alcohol into the wounds. They fast. They beg. They're training their bodies and minds to stop feeling pain, so they can survive whatever the war throws at them.
Misery.
Death.
Humiliation.
Poverty.
Hunger.
Violence.
It's all there. But not a single tear lands in the notebook. Even when they see a dead body, there's no sentimental explanation.
And yet. No, because of that. Something rises up from between the lines of that compressed prose: two boys desperately clinging to the love of a mother who's gone far away.
Write by not writing.
The Trilogy That Smashes Its Own Truth
The book has sequels, and they're wild.
The Notebook was so good that I went straight on to the next one. In the second book, The Proof, one of the twins, Lucas, becomes the main character.
The cruelty, the black humor, the fairy-tale strangeness of the first book quietly fade away. In their place comes the loneliness of people holding their breath under a communist regime. It's spare, and it's raw.
Then comes the ending. Right there, The Notebook and The Proof transform into a story about how a novel gets made in the first place. It's what's called metafiction. Put simply, it's a novel that turns to you and asks, "Was the story you've been reading ever true?"
The surprises and the storytelling are as sharp as ever. But with this second book, I think Kristof stepped onto the front line of what a novel can be.
And then the third book, The Third Lie, takes the truth the first two finally revealed and smashes it to pieces all over again.
Wait, what? I actually said that out loud.
Writing in a Language That Isn't Yours
"How could anyone write prose this dry?"
The clue is in the author's life.
I was born and raised in Japan. I read, write, and talk in Japanese. It's so natural that I never think about language at all. But some people have been forced to live their daily lives not in their mother tongue, but in the language of an enemy.
Agota Kristof was one of them.
She was born in 1935 near the border between Hungary and Austria, and she spent her childhood in a region that became a World War II battlefield. First German. Then Russian. Every time her country was occupied, the language she was forced to use changed.
After the war, she married and had a child under Hungary's socialist dictatorship. In 1956, when Soviet troops crushed the Hungarian Revolution, she fled to Austria with her husband, carrying her four-month-old daughter. She was 21. Later the family moved to Switzerland, and a hard life in exile began.
She didn't start learning French until she was past her mid-twenties. About ten years later, she began writing fiction in that foreign language and mailed her manuscript straight to a French publisher. That manuscript was her debut, The Notebook.
For me, this is the real thrill of reading debuts. Before she became a master, she was nobody. A woman working in a factory in a foreign country, looking up words in a dictionary, writing letter by letter. And her very first step is this strong.
Rough. Short. No decoration.
I think that's because, for her, French was a borrowed language. She couldn't write it well, so she had no choice but to strip away everything extra. Her weakness became her weapon.
If you want to write, isn't that incredibly encouraging?
I also read her memoir, The Illiterate, and it's harrowing. One passage hit me hard:
"If I hadn't left my country, what kind of life would I have had? A harder, poorer one, I think. But I wouldn't have been this lonely, this torn apart. I might even have been happy." (p. 66)
She's right. If society had been sane, she'd never have needed to flee.
But at the same time, I hear a quiet resolve:
"What I'm sure of is this: wherever I was, in whatever language, I would have written." (p. 67)
"I know I will never write French the way native French writers do. But I intend to keep writing, aiming for the best I can do." (p. 90)
She knows she can't write it perfectly. She aims for her best anyway. Is there a better creed for a writer?
I Bought 35 Books
"So, Hovinci, what happened to you?"
Well. I bought books.
I can't possibly read that many, and I added 35 more anyway. This from a stay-at-home dad whose wife keeps saying it's time he got a job. (I just failed an interview, by the way.)
Here's the haul:
- A guidebook to MOTHER, the legendary Japanese video game said to be influenced by The Notebook
- Debut novels by Achebe, Clarke, and Mark Twain for the 100 Debuts project
- Books on police work and on witches, for writing mysteries
- Antony Beevor's The Second World War (Japanese version has three volumes).
- A book that influenced Hayao Miyazaki when he made Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
- An Andrew Wyeth art book I'd wanted for ages
All of that for under 15,000 yen, about a hundred dollars. Japan's online used bookstores are unreal, right?
No regrets at all.
Takashi Tachibana, a well-known Japanese nonfiction writer, left behind fourteen rules for reading. Rule number one: "Don't spare money on books."
If you want to be a writer, never stop taking things in. And a book only becomes part of you once you've bought it, marked it up, and made it your own.
Honestly, my novel ideas are nowhere near ready. So for now, I'm going to keep feeding myself whatever I find fascinating. And I'll keep thinking. Nobody can teach you how to find ideas. You have to find your own way.
Agota started with nothing but a dictionary.
So this middle-aged guy who found his North Star in a 70-yen paperback is going to keep at it, too.