Yesterday, a novella by Agota Kristóf

Agota Kristóf's Yesterday is a quiet, mesmerizing novella that moves at the pace of a melancholy dream. It’s the kind of book you can pick up at midnight and read through in one sitting, never wanting to put it down. 

That's because Kristóf's bare-bones narration avoids any superfluous detail. Every line is like a beat in a rhythm. The bleak and cold logic of the narrative make the dreams sequences, with their arbitrary images, all the more surreal, with that vague sense that everything is symbolic of something--of what, we can't say.

Our narrator, Sandor, is an immigrant in a nameless country. Kristóf herself fled Hungary after the crushed uprising of 1956. Her other more well-known works, The Notebook Trilogy, are about immigrants in a foreign land as well. As in those books, Yesterday never explicitly states where it takes place, but gives us a few key details (Sandor's name, for example) that strongly imply that he’s Hungarian. 

Sandor’s been working in a factory for ten years. At night, he writes. We see his dream journal interspersed throughout the story. 

One day, out of desperation, he leaves work, wanders through town, and commits suicide in a park. Chapter Two opens with, “Of course, I didn’t die.” In the mental hospital where he is brought to convalesce, Sandor recites to a psychiatrist his old lie about being a war orphan. The sympathy he gets from this yarn is preferable to his real backstory, the kind you’d steal someone else’s identity to avoid sharing with literally anyone. 

Alienation is the common thread in Sandor’s life: as a factory worker driven to despair by monotony and poverty, as a migrant in exile, and as a career womanizer who stays emotionally aloof. Most of his fellow expats are desperately unhappy as well, each in their own way. There’s not much longing for the old country, just the aimlessness of uprooted individuals in a land that’s not their own. A spate of suicides begins to narrow their numbers. 

So what keeps Sandor going, on his good days? As cynical as he is, the answer is dreams. His dream of being a writer; the literal dreams which seem to be the only thing he writes about; and “Line,” the dream-girl who will one day walk into his life and give him all the love he’s never had. Sandor uses some misdirection to keep us guessing as to who or what Line is standing in for. When she actually shows up, Sandor’s obsession with her spirals out of control, and her relationship with his past is even more complicated than we thought. 

Yesterday is a novel about people for whom the past is geographical, a place that’s tantalizingly real but not accessible. Instead of focusing on familiar tropes like discrimination and nostalgia for the old country, Kristóf is more interested in the immigrant as conflicted exile. She could not have created Sandor’s voice, brimming with irony and existential angst, without the ambivalence of someone who had always been alienated, even back home. (Just how Sandor’s ambivalence manifests itself is a bit convoluted at times and strains plausibility.) 

What’s the difference between a dream and an obsession? What do you do when you hit a dead end in life, other than retrace your steps? In Yesterday, the past is a riddle characters keep trying to solve, like a dream that doesn’t quite make sense, though they feel its echoes for years to come.