Bleak but beautiful; a testimony of Eastern Europe from a Hungarian woman settled in Switzerland after the failed Hungarian revolution against Stalinist Communism in 1956.


Writing in French Kristof has worked hard to find a form that is true to her story of two defenceless young boys subjected to the cruel twists and harsh conditions imposed by war. A story that is extremely cruel but sometimes amusing is unreeled in sixty-one tiny chapters with a deadpan delivery as concise and staccato as a military bulletin. Here is ‘the story behind the story’ of the militarisation (or brutalisation) of a generation first by war, then by two military occupations then by the imposition of Communism.


Early on the two young brothers, separated from their mother, realise that only through toughening themselves can they possibly survive. The toughening of the flesh however is accompanied by a toughening of the spirit which excludes sentiment to the extent that at the end of the book they use their father as a living mine detector as they resolve to cross the border westwards.


A very simple, brilliantly clear and readable text with the chilling beauty of truth perfectly stated. Kristof manages in a very conscise and authoritative way to record one of the great and ghastly themes of our century; the constant application of force majeure by heartless ideological régimes on the soft flesh of human individuals. It is a great and noble theme for a writer of our time to tackle and most of all she reveals to westerners — which perhaps was her intention — the background of the brutalised and yet in some ways naive post-communist citizens that we have been discovering as our neighbours since 1989.

‘The frontier has been rebuilt. It cannot now be crossed.

Our country is surrounded by barbed wire; we are completely cut off from the rest of the world.’ p140