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Agota Kristóf. Clous: Poemes hongrois et français. Trans. Maria Mailat. Carouge, Switzerland. Editions Zoé. 2016. 200 pages.
Western Europe is usually credited with inventing expressionism and surrealism at the end of the nineteenth century, but both artistic movements may well be natural ways of being, seeing, and thinking the world that the citizens of "the other Europe" never lost. Hungarian writer Agota Kristof's poems remind us of this just as much as the 2016 Neustadt Prize laureate, Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešić. Kristof's poems also remind us of another dimension forgotten by our hyperurbanized world, as they express nostalgia for a simple, bucolic lifestyle reminiscent of Haim Nahman Bialik's paeans to the homestead.
Born in 1935, Kristof was ten when...