Posts Tagged ‘Magda Szabo’

7 Sep

‘The Fawn’ by Magda Szabo – An Actress’s Life-Long Hatred of Angela

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘The Fawn’ by Magda Szabo       (1959) – 285 pages        Translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix

 

In ‘The Fawn’, our narrator Eszter descends from an aristocratic Hungarian family. However due to her sickly lawyer father’s frequent illnesses, he stays at home and does not practice law. Thus the family lives in reduced circumstances with Eszter’s mother making a little money by giving piano lessons to children in the neighborhood. Eszter as a child has to do the housework that her mother would ordinarily do, but the family remains poor.

One of the neighbor girls who takes piano lessons from Eszter’s mother is Angela. Angela’s family is well-to-do, and she is a beautiful child. Eszter hates her instantly.

“I have loathed and hated Angéla from the moment I first saw her. Even when I am dead, if there is any life after death, I shall hate her still.”

The story in ‘The Fawn’ takes place in those turbulent years during and after World War II when first Germany invaded Hungary, and then the Russians attacked and defeated the Germans, and then the Russians remained in Hungary, and Hungary became a satellite state of the Soviet Union.

As ‘The Fawn’ progresses, our narrator Eszter grows up and becomes a famous Hungarian actress in Budapest.

One tool which is very helpful in ‘The Fawn’ and that I wish more novels today would do is a list of the main characters at the beginning with a short description of their place in the novel.

Despite Eszter’s success as an actress, she retains her childhood hatred of Angela. When Eszter finds out that Angela is living in Budapest with a husband and that Angela’s husband is translating a Shakespeare play into Hungarian, you might imagine what happens next.

One of the aspects of ‘The Fawn’ that stood out for me is that the narrator of the novel, Eszter, is not a good person. It seems to me that in our more recent novels, the narrator, especially a female narrator, is assumed to be and usually is a very fine person. I found it refreshing having to deal with a narrator who is morally ambiguous at best.

That is the mark of a talented writer to me, that they don’t just try to get by with the good natures of their characters. The New York Review of Books must think the same way, since ‘The Fawn’ is the fourth Magda Szabo novel they have made available to us.

 

Grade :   A-

 

 

26 Mar

‘The Door’ by Magda Szabo – The Impossible Housekeeper

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: , .

‘The Door’ by Magda Szabo   (1987)   262 pages     Translated by Len Rix     Grade: A-

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I wish we had a housekeeper for our house like Emerence in ‘The Door’.  Cleaning houses, sweeping the streets, even shoveling all the snow in the neighborhood when there’s a snowstorm, Emerence does the work of five people.

“The old woman worked like a robot.  She lifted unliftable furniture without the slightest regard for herself.  There was something superhuman, almost alarming in her physical strength and her capacity for work, all the more so because in fact she had no need to take so much on.  Emerence obviously reveled in her work.  She loved it.” 

The unnamed young woman who tells this story and who employs Emerence to clean her house is totally different from Emerence.  She is the modern woman, spends all day on her computer, and is a globe-trotting author who wins literary awards.   She and her husband who is also a writer have no time for all the details such as cleaning the house.

This modern woman and Emerence are a study in contrasts, and they get into epic fights.  However these two opposites soon develop a close relationship.  Emerence soon becomes a highly critical mother figure to this young woman.

Emerence is a peasant from rural Hungary, and she lived through World War II.  She’s had a hard life.  She is illiterate and abrasive and stubborn, prone to bitter outbursts. All of her truths have been hard won, and she wastes no time setting this spoiled modern young woman straight.  Emerence says to the young woman,

“You think there always will be someone to cook and clean for you, a plate full of food, paper to scribble on, the master to love you; and everyone will live for eternity, like a fairy tale; and the only problem you might encounter is bad things written about you in the papers, which I’m sure is a terrible disgrace, but then why did you choose such a low trade, where any bandit can pour shit over you?”

There is a dog, Viola, in this story.  The young couple buy the dog, but of course the new dog is immediately enamored with old Emerence to the point where it is almost her dog.

The ultimate hate-love relationship exists between this young modern woman and her old housekeeper.  I say ‘hate-love’ because at first these two opposites are disgusted and furious with each other, and it is only later that they recognize that there is a deep closeness between them.  It is fascinating to watch the war and the devotion between these two played out to the extremes in ‘The Door’.