The Proof : The Third Lie

The child says, ‘That’s the only difference between the dead and those who go away, isn’t it? Those who aren’t dead will return.’
Lucas says, ‘But how do we know they aren’t dead when they’re away?’
‘We can’t know.’

Following on from The Notebook, which recounted the survival of twin brothers during war and occupation, The Proof and The Third Lie complete the trilogy of novels in which Kristof, as an emigré writer, forged wholly distinctive ways to treat the 20th-century European experience of war, occupation and separation.

As the brothers Claus and Lucas, isolated in different countries, yearn for the seemingly impossible restoration of their lost connection, perspectives shift, memories diverge, identity becomes unstable. Written in Kristof ’s spare, direct style, the novels are an exploration both of the aftereffects of trauma and of the nature of story-telling.

‘At the heart of this acrid trilogy, in all its studied understatement and lack of portentousness, we can feel the author’s slow-burning rage at the wholesale erasure of certainty and continuity in the world of her childhood and adolescence. At the same time we sense Kristof saturninely enjoying this annihilation for its imaginative potential. She will reassemble a shattered world on her own rigorous terms, and watch us wince and shudder in the process.’
– Jonathan Keates, Times Literary Supplement