I Don’t Care
Praise for Agota Kristóf
‘At a short story level, Kristóf – one of the 20th century’s great writers – reminds us what startling potential and transcendental power the form holds. The stories in I Don’t Care are fairytales from a strange and illuminating landscape’ – Camilla Grudova
‘Pure genius’ Max Porter
‘Startling brutality and ferocity’
Eimear McBride, The Believer
‘Kristóf’s sentences are like skeletons, commemorations of indescribable sadness that have been meticulously scrubbed of gore and gristle. She seems to sculpt her stories by omission, the great unspoken throughout her books being Hungarian. One might think of Kristóf’s fiction as an act of recuperation, an expression of loss that preserves loss in the form’
Jennifer Krasinski, The New Yorker
‘The sublime refinement of her craft comes close to knocking the breath out of our bodies’ Helen Oyeyemi
‘Kristóf will reassemble a shattered world on her own rigorous terms, and watch us wince and shudder in the process’ Times Literary Supplement
‘Chillingly unsentimental’ Sunday Times
‘When I first heard someone talk about Ágota Kristóf, I thought it was an east European mispronunciation of Agatha Christie; but I soon discovered not only that Ágota is not Agatha, but that Ágota’s horror is much more terrifying than Agatha’s’ Slavoj Žižek, The Guardian
‘Mischievous and mournful . . . moves at a velocity that puts one in mind of Italo Calvino. Readers of modernist European fiction ought to snatch this up’ Publishers Weekly
‘Many of Kristof’s stark vignettes, reported in unflinching detail, have a cool, disturbing power – part documentary-like, part surreal – that is fierce and distinctive’ Kirkus Reviews
‘For Kristóf, fiction is the only thing that might provide an escape from solitude . . . Kristóf’s writing shows us both the pleasure and the necessity of literary refraction’ Missouri Williams, The Nation
‘Lingers in the imagination long after you’ve turned the last page’ The Washington Post Book World
‘Stark and haunting’ San Francisco Chronicle
‘Ágota Kristóf should perhaps be seen as our transnational bard’ Gabriel Josipovici
ágota kristóf
I Don’t Care
Translated from French by Chris Andrews
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Originally published in French as C’est égal by Éditions de Seuil in 2004
Published by arrangement with New Directions Publishing This translation first published in the United States of America by New Directions 2024
First published in Great Britain in Penguin International Writers 2025 001
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I Don’t Care
Above, below, blue heads, thistles. Somebody singing something.
I don’t care: it’s not even pretty. The song is sad, and old, so old.
And tomorrow? You get up, where do you go? Nowhere. Or, I don’t know, maybe I will go somewhere.
I don’t care, anyway, nowhere feels right. But it’s hard to sleep, with the bells that clang, and the clocks.
Spread out your handkerchief, sir. I would like to kneel down.
Be my guest.
There were two of them in the tram. One to ring the bell, one to punch the tickets.
No one left to get off at the terminus.
But that is where all the trams come to a halt. No one there to get on either. They don’t care. They kneel down, exchange a few words. Would you like to exchange a few words with me? I thought you wanted to pray. I’m done.
In that case, then, we can head back. I’ll call you tomorrow.
What’s new?
How are your children?
Thanks for asking. Only two of them are sick, for the moment. The older ones go into stores, to warm up. How about you?
Nothing special. Our dog is housebroken now. We bought some furniture on credit. From time to time, it snows.