Where are you, Matias?

Where are you, Matias? I have lost everything because I left you. I tried without you. I played, stole, killed, loved. But none of it made sense. Without you, the play was meaningless, the revolution was without spark, and love was without taste. For twenty years I was nothing but a gloomy absence. Agota Kristof... a Hungarian writer born in 1953 — a Hungarian woman under the Soviet Union's control, which led to Agota fleeing at less than twenty-one years old with her husband and their infant child to exile. To Switzerland. An exile whose language she did not speak, a world she knew nothing about, crushed there under work in a watch factory, the exile that tore her spirit with longing for her homeland, gave her the French language "the enemy language" as she called it, an unwelcome gift for writing in.