Emerence is almost mythic: a tireless worker of peasant stock and thoroughly anti-intellectual. The loyalty between these women is matched only by their incompatibility. The fact that I was trying to save her rather than destroy her changes nothing.” It begins with a confession: “I killed Emerence. The Door deals with the thorny relationship between the narrator (based on Szabó herself) and her housekeeper, Emerence. Szabó seems to believe that we least understand the people we most love, and her characters, in spite of their loyalty to each another, are frequently at cross purposes. They take you to war-torn or occupied Eastern Europe and into the lives of some truly unforgettable characters.

Szabó’s works are as psychologically rich as they are surprising. Since then, NYRB has put out three more: the quieter Iza’s Ballad, the less conventional Katalin Street, and, last month, Abigail, the Szabó novel best-loved in Hungary. Szabó’s The Door was one of the New York Times Book Review’s top 10 books of 2015. Thanks to New York Review Books (NYRB) Classics, we now have four of her novels in English. If you haven’t yet discovered her, you’re in for a treat.

So I often wonder how many excellent untranslated books there are out there that we’ll never have the pleasure of reading.įor instance, when Hungarian writer Magda Szabó died in 2007, her work was largely unknown in the English-speaking world. To do it well takes time, and translators are notoriously badly paid.

The door magda szabo review