They have an anthropologist's detachment in viewing the circumstances of their own lives: they beg, for example, not for money, but "to observe people's reactions". By this method they can be witness to the most distressing events and be, apparently, unaffected. Kristof's great skill is to always be convincing as she brings us through the process by which - to better survive the wartime situation of which they are unavoidably a part - the twins rid themselves of all instinctive feeling and manage, by a series of exercises, to locate all pain outside of their bodies. We begin to feel included and implicated in their "we". They narrate in the first-person plural and so we are there with them, horrified that we can begin to see and comprehend the world as they do. Those two boys - names unknown in 'The Notebook' - tell a story that is frequently startling in its plainly told brutality. In the fractured society she creates in the dislocated time in which these characters have to live and in the desolate location where the twin boys who are central to this story are brought to live, there is no certainty, except the usual one: death.
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