That thing called love

“The Notebook Trilogy” was shocking. I could not believe the words I was reading. Yet it all started innocently enough!

The first paragraph was pure Grimms’ Fairy Story. You know. Children! Twins! Little Twin boys! Dropped off to live with their grandmother in her old house at the edge of town.

Then! Kaboom! Literary sucker-punches that hit you right on the jaw, knock you down and keep you kneeling, bloodied and groggy on the canvas.

Grandma is not a sweet old dear. The Twins……..not lovely young kids. The town………some sort of hell hole. The story…….a tangle of intertwined misery of two little boys adrift in a war torn country……..somewhere. Sweet Jesus what on earth have I stumbled into here?

But like the two sturdy little protagonists, I soldier on and by story’s end I have found an understanding……….of sorts. And a peace…….of sorts.

This is an alarmingly interesting book. Agota Kristoff, an escapee from Hungary just ahead of the Russians, understood suffering at the small, human, family level that, massed a million fold, makes up the huge ebb and flow of the insanity of human history.

She also saw clearly the lifetime scars that childhood trauma gifts to its victims. The self deceit that helps young minds keep going when the cruelty is too much to bear.

“The Notebook Trilogy” was written in French, a language newly learned by Agota when she was safe in Switzerland. Writing in her recently mastered tongue may well have given her story its direct, no nonsense, naive, childlike aura, so terribly shocking to my sensibilities. War is hell. I knew that, but I didn’t think of children.

But that’s only part of it. “The Notebook Trilogy” also carries that day by day story we live by. None of us is perfect. All of us make mistakes. Not every thing we say is suitable for every ear. Not every deed is above nor beyond reproach. Yet we don’t stop living. We don’t slump to the ground in self-pitying self loathing or self hatred. No! Somehow we survive, just as the twins survive.

Does that which does not kill us make us stronger or are our mental cannons simply fixed against self slaughter? Is any of us all good or completely bad.