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The Big Notebook, the first part of a trilogy, is a novel about two twins, narrated in the first person plural ("we"), set in an unspecified country during World War II. The trilogy continues in Proof and The Third Lie, separating the twins.
The twins, clever and unusual, leave the city with their mother and arrive in a poor village to live with their grandmother, their mother's mother - a dirty, vengeful old woman suspected of poisoning her husband. The grandmother treats them like servants, stealing the money and clothes that their mother sends, forcing them to survive. The twins are hardened through "exercises": they get used to hunger, pain, cold, steal, lie, blackmail and even kill in order to survive. They write only truthful compositions in a large notebook - they describe facts without feeling, seeking objective truth. They meet characters such as the priest, Rabbit's Mouth (the neighbor's daughter), the captain and the delivery man, using them in their plans.
The war brings occupation, bombings and horrors: the twins see hangings, rapes, famine. Their mother later asks them back, but they choose their grandmother, becoming attached to her harshness. The novel ends with their transformation into cold, calculating survivors, where the inseparability of the twins (one feels the pain of the other) clashes with the loss of identity.
Themes: the cruelty of war that corrupts children, the ethics of survival (good/bad in relative terms), truth versus lies, rural rudeness versus urban. The language is dry, without pathos, like a children's diary, creating distance and shock. Kristóf, drawing inspiration from autobiographical elements (the escape from Hungary in 1956), shows how history breaks humanity.
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