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WORK TITLE: Iza’s Ballad
WORK NOTES: trans by George Szirtes
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 10/5/1917-11/19/2007
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Hungarian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magda_Szab%C3%B3 * http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/magda-szabos-the-door * http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/07/magda-szabo-blinding-need-for-each-other/ * https://www.theguardian.com/news/2007/nov/28/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries * https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2015/02/20/book-review-the-door-magda-szabo/COU84rGagKuscB76BKgOIO/story.html * https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/magda-szabo-the-hungarian-writer-you-probably-dont-know-but-should/2016/10/19/d444be34-9242-11e6-9c85-ac42097b8cc0_story.html?utm_term=.80f1ee3e7883
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born October 5, 1917, in Debrecen, Hungary; died November 19, 2007, in Debrecen, Hungary; married 1947; husband’s name: Tibor Szobotka (died 1982).
EDUCATION:István Tisza (now Lajos Kossuth) University, Debrecen, graduated.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Also taught at the secondary school level in Debrecen, Hungary, 1940-42; Hódmezővásárhely, Hungary, 1942-45; and Budapest, Hungary, 1950-59. Ministry of Religion and Education, Budapest, Hungary, civil servant, 1945-49.
MEMBER:Széchenyi Literary Academy, founder and member; elected to the European Academy of Sciences (1985-90).
AWARDS:Baumgarten Prize, 1949 (withdrawn by Hungary’s Communist government for political reasons); Attila József Award, 1959 and 1972; Kossuth Prize, 1978; Tibor Déry Award, 1996; Prix Femina Étranger, 2003, for best foreign novel for Az ajtó (The Door); Oscar Weidenfeld Translation Prize for English version of Az ajtó, 2006; Prix Cévennes, 2007, for Katalin Utca (Katalin Street); Grand Cross of Merit, Hungarian Republic. Received honorary doctorates from the Theological Academy of Debrecen, 1993, and the University of Miskolc, 2001.
RELIGION: Christian
WRITINGS
Also the author of the poetry collection Vissza Az Emberig (title means “back to the Human), 1949.
Abigél (“Abigail”) was made into a television series in 1978, and Régimódi történet (“Old-Fashioned Story”) was adapted for the theater. Szabó’s writings have been translated into forty-two languages.
SIDELIGHTS
The Hungarian novelist, essayist, memoirist, dramatist, and poet Magda Szabó was born on October 5, 1917, in Debrecen, Hungary. Early on, she was educated at home by her father, who taught her Latin before she entered secondary school. She went on to attend István Tisza (now Lajos Kossuth) University of Debrecen, where she studied philology and history. From 1940 to 1945, she taught Latin and Hungarian at two girls’ schools (in Debrecen and Hódmezővásárhely). Szabó entered the civil service in 1945, working at the Hungarian Ministry of Religion and Education, but she lost her job when the communists took control of the government in 1949. By then, she had already begun to write, publishing her first collection of poetry, Bárány Boldizsár (“Lamb”) in 1947 and her second, Vissza Az Emberig (“Back to the Human”) in 1949. In 1949 she was awarded the Baumgarten Prize, but the communist regime had the prize rescinded for political reasons. That year she also lost her job at the ministry. During the communist years in Hungary, from 1949 to 1956, her work was banned, and she went back to teaching in secondary schools.
Freskó (“Fresco”), Szabó’s first novel, was not published until 1958. It was extremely successful and set her on her path to a fruitful writing career. Beginning with this book, Szabó’s fiction focused was middle-class life in small Hungarian communities, delving into universal human themes. Szabó also wrote about her own family’s history, especially in what is considered her greatest novel, Régimódi Történet (“Old-Fashioned Story”), which was adapted for the theater. Szabó wrote several plays for the theater and for radio. She has also written in other genres, including adventure books and fairy stories for young readers. One of the most popular, Abigél (“Abigail”), was made even more popular by being adapted for a television series in the 1970s. Szabó died at the age of ninety in her hometown of Debrecen.
The Door
Szabó’s novel Az Ajtó was published in English as The Door. This semiautobiographical story, written in the first person, focuses on the complicated relationship between a Hungarian writer and her longtime, somewhat enigmatic and secretive housekeeper. The narrator, Magda, has a fascination with the housekeeper, Emerence, whose secrets she feels a need to discover. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly called the book “poignant” as well as “a lucid and politically intriguing character study.” Clara Gyorgyey, reviewing The Door in World Literature Today, remarked that it was “a shockingly accurate psychological portrait of her [Szabó’s] most unique character.” Gyorgyey also found the novel “laced with gentle humor” and written in a style that “is as mesmerizing as are her [Szabó’s] characters.” New Yorker writer Cynthia Zarin compared Szabó’s depiction of “various village types” to the characters in a “parable” and felt that Szabó’s ability to dissect unpleasant events and relationships has a “bone-shaking” quality. Noting that the story parallel’s events in Szabó’s own life, Zarin also pointed out that the novel “begins and ends with a dream; it reads like one, too—a fever dream, the shadow of a shadow.”
In a review in the Boston Globe, Michele Filgate called attention to the character of Emerence and the way in which she infiltrates the life of Magda and her husband. Emerence, said Filgate, “is the kind of person who forces people to make room for her in their life, and in Magda’s case, that leads to a profound and meaningful relationship—one that will haunt her.” New York Review of Books contributor Deborah Eisenberg described The Door as a book of “frankly autobiographical recollections” endowed “with fiction’s allusive and ambiguous purposes and effects.” Eisenberg admitted that, for her, reading The Door was “white-knuckled experience,” because of Szabó’s “finely calibrated parceling out of information” over the course of the narrative. With reference to the relationship of the women, Eisenberg observed: “The social determinants of behavior and mental experience could hardly be more graphically expressed than they are by these two women and their relationship, and there is plenty of room between them for paradoxical conflicts and misunderstandings so severe as to border on both the slapstick and the abusive.” Eisenberg also suggested that the book deals with the “mysteries of human connections” and “the mortal struggle to breach the gulf between oneself and another, the hundreds of rationales with which we console ourselves for failing truly to do so, and the heavy costs of love.”
Iza's Ballad
Iza’s Ballad, first published in Hungarian under the title Pilátus, follows the lives of four people—husband and wife Vince and Ettie and their grown-up daughter, Iza, and her former husband, Artal—over the course of a few months. The narrative slowly uncovers the secrets each hides from the others. A writer for Publishers Weekly deemed Iza’s Ballad a “subdued and melancholy meditation on grief and mourning” and found Szabó to be a “sophisticated story-teller who confronts how memories are constructed.” Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Lauren Groff gave a more mixed assessment. Iza’s Ballad, claimed Groff, comes off as “convoluted” when compared with The Door. “The relationships between characters,” explained Groff, “are defined only through slow accretion; the shifts between present time and past time aren’t delineated.” Groff also found the pronoun antecedents to be so confusing that she had to puzzle out certain paragraphs to determine which pronouns referred to which character. Some of the text’s denseness, Groff conceded, could have been the fault of the translator, and she acknowledged that the narrative grew “teeth” as it progressed, in part because Szabo “excels at summoning the delicate and wordless spaces between people who love each other.”
Pasha Malla, writing in the Globe and Mail, also noted that Iza’s Ballad shares many themes with The Door, such as “servitude, co-dependence, power, disgrace.” Where Iza’s Ballad differs is in that it “relies on contrasts; Ettie exists fundamentally in relation, and opposition, to her daughter, not as a mystery to be plumbed and solved.” Malla characterized Iza’s Ballad as a “study of the spaces between people, and what those represent.” Describing the novel as a “slow, circling, rather opaque book,” London Independent reviewer Jonathan Gibbs went on to comment: “[Iza’s Ballad ] is a book of gaps and silences, but the strangest silence of all is in what can be said about the realities of life under the threat of censorship.” Kathleen Rooney, writing in the Chicago Tribune, likewise emphasized the political undertones of the novel, stating that it “deftly explores not only the complications of life under communism in the mid-20th century, but also the idiosyncratic and individual failures of empathy that infiltrate human life no matter the time or place.” Washington Post reviewer Roxana Robinson declared that Iza’s Ballad “raises some of the great questions, those that address the nature of trust, love, and compassion.” Recommending the book strongly, Robinson praised Szabó’s understanding of family dynamics, summing up the story as a “quiet but perilous venture into the depths of the human heart.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, November 24, 2014, review of The Door, p. 49; August 8, 2016, review of Iza’s Ballad, p. 38.
World Literature Today, 1995, Clara Gyorgyey, reveew of The Door, p. 835; March 4, 2003, Clara Gyorgyey, review of Für Elise, p. 103; 2000, review of Mézescsók Cerberusnak: Novellák, p. 205.
ONLINE
Boston Globe, https://www.bostonglobe.com (February 20, 2015), Michele Filgate, review of The Door.
Chicago Tribune, http://www.chicagotribune.com (October 18, 2016), Kathleen Rooney, review of Iza’s Ballad.
Globe and Mail (London, England), http://www.theglobeandmail.com (October 28, 2016), Pasha Malla, review of Iza’s Ballad.
Guardian (London, England), https://www.theguardian.com/ (November 28, 2007), George Gömöri, ” Magda Szabó.”
Independent (London, England) http://www.independent.co.uk (November 22, 2007), “Magda Szabó, Acclaimed Author of The Door”; (August 7, 2014 ), Jonathan Gibbs, review of Iza’s Ballad.
New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com (April 29, 2016), Cynthia Zarin, review of The Door.
New York Review of Books, http://www.nybooks.com (April 7, 2016), Deborah Eisenberg, “A Blinding Need for Each Other,” review of The Door.
New York Times Book Review, https://www.nytimes.com (November 11, 2016), Lauren Groff, review of Iza’s Ballad.
Washington Post Online (October 20, 2016), Roxana Robinson, “Magda Szabo, a Hungarian Novelist Once Silenced, Speaks Again in a New Book.”
Magda Szabó
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the Hungarian writer. For the Canadian miniaturist, see Magda Szabo.
The native form of this personal name is Szabó Magda. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.
Magda Szabó (October 5, 1917 – November 19, 2007) was a major Hungarian novelist. She also wrote dramas, essays, studies, memories and poetry.
Born in Debrecen, Szabó graduated from the University of Debrecen as a teacher of Latin and of Hungarian. She started working as a teacher in a Calvinist girls' school in Debrecen and Hódmezővásárhely. Between 1945 and 1949 she worked in the Ministry of Religion and Education. She married the writer and translator Tibor Szobotka in 1947.
She began her writing career as a poet, publishing her first book Bárány ("Lamb") in 1947, which was followed by Vissza az emberig ("Back to the Human") in 1949. In 1949 she was awarded the Baumgarten Prize, which was immediately withdrawn for political reasons. She was dismissed from the Ministry in the same year.
During the Stalinist era from 1949 to 1956, the government did not allow her works to be published. Since her unemployed husband was also stigmatized by the communist regime, she was forced to teach in an elementary school.
She wrote her first novel, Freskó ("Fresco") during these years and when it was published in 1958 it achieved an overwhelming success. Her most widely read novel Abigél ("Abigail", 1970) is an adventure story about a schoolgirl boarding in eastern Hungary during World War II.
She received several prizes in Hungary and her works have been published in 42 countries. In 2003 she was the winner of the Prix Femina étranger, a French literary award, for the best foreign novel.
Her novel Abigél was popularised through a television series in 1978. Abigél was also chosen as the sixth most popular novel at the Hungarian version of Big Read. Three more of her novels appeared in the top 100: Für Elise, An Old-Fashioned Story and The Door.
Works in English
The Door (ISBN 0880333049 [1995], ISBN 1-84343-193-9 [2005])
The Fawn (ASIN B0007E2OQC)
The Night of the Pig-Killing or Night of the Pigkilling (ASIN B0007E2OOY)
Tell Sally (ASIN B0007IZJPG)
Sziget-kék (ISBN 9631173402) (Island Blue in English)
An Old-fashioned Story (play version)
Katalin Street
The Gift of the Wondrous Fig Tree
Iza's Ballad
Magda Szabó
One of Hungary's most prominent women writers, she won several literary awards
Magda Szabo
Szabó breathed life into the conflicts of middle-class families in provincial towns. Photograph: Magyar Nemzet/AFP
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George Gömöri
Wednesday 28 November 2007 09.21 GMT
First published on Wednesday 28 November 2007 09.21 GMT
Contemporary Hungarian prose is now translated into most western languages. Writers such as the Nobel prizewinning Imre Kertész or the excellent Péter Nádas are no longer just names for the English reader. Among the fairly recent discoveries of English critics stands Magda Szabó, who has died aged 90. Her books were translated into 42 languages, but her greatest success in western Europe came with a book written only in 1987, Az ajtó (The Door). The story of a domestic help and her complex relationship with the narrator, it won France's Prix Femina Étranger in 2003 and also had a favourable press in England, where it appeared in Len Rix's translation in 2005.
Born in Debrecen, north-eastern Hungary, Szabó was a precocious child whom her father taught Latin before she went to school. Educated in the local Protestant secondary school for girls, she was recognised by her teachers as an exceptionally intelligent but headstrong young woman. She read Latin and Hungarian philology and history at the István Tisza (now Lajos Kossuth) University of Debrecen. From 1940 she taught in a grammar school in the city and, from 1942, in a similar Protestant school at Hódmez vásárhely.
After the second world war she worked for four years in the ministry for religions and education, but lost her job with the communist takeover of 1949. In the same year the vindictiveness of the new powers was demonstrated in annulling the decision of the curators of the Baumgarten prize to award it to Szabó for her first two books of poetry, published in 1947 and 1949 respectively. She married the critic and translator Tibor Szobotka in 1947. Between 1950 and 1959 she taught in a primary school in Budapest.
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She made her name with her first novel Freskó (Mural) in 1958, which was an immediate success. It appeared in a period after the suppression of the 1956 revolution when no Hungarian writer of any worth would give political support to the Soviet-sponsored government of János Kádár. Szabó's forte was her ability to bring alive characters and show conflicts within a middle-class family and in a small provincial community; she also knew how to tell a good story.
People from her childhood and early youth in Debrecen provided models for the novels which followed, namely Az oz (The Fawn, 1959), Disznótor (Pig-Killing, 1960) and A Danaida (The Danaid, 1964), all psychological novels, with either passionate or frustrated female characters. While Mózes, egy huszonkett (Moses, Book I:22) deals with contemporary conflicts between generations of Hungarians, and the youth novel Abigél (Abigail, 1970) achieved great popularity, from the early 1970s onwards Szabó's themes changed by becoming increasingly personal. In more than one book she began to explore the secrets of her closer family. Ókút (Ancient Well, 1970) is a charming string of reminiscences of Szabó's childhood, including vignettes of her parents, a Calvinist man and a Catholic woman, "two would-be writers" whose tales prompted her to write stories of her own.
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Régimódi történet (Old-Fashioned Story, 1977), possibly Szabó's best novel, is a detailed history of her family, the Szabós and the Jablonczays, and the scene of their conflicts: Debrecen during the times of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. It was claimed that this was the first Hungarian novel dealing openly with women's sexuality. Adapted for the stage, it ran with great success in scores of Hungarian theatres. In Hungary, books other than The Door enjoyed more popularity. I happened to be at the launch of her delightful short-story collection Mézescsók Cerberusnak (Honey-Cake for Cerberus) during the 1999 book week, where, in windy weather, hundreds were queueing up patiently in front of the open-air bookstall to have their book inscribed by her. Even this was possibly superseded by Szabó's memoirs Für Elise (2002), once again recalling the Debrecen of her youth in a magical, half-realistic, half-fairy-tale-like manner.
She wrote several plays, some of which handled historical themes: Kiálts, város! (Shout, City! 1971) is about the past of Debrecen, focusing on its citizens' moral conflicts; the trilogy Béla király (King Béla, 1984) discusses contemporary problems under the guise of the middle ages. She also wrote plays for the radio, a collection of which was published in 2006. Add to these several books written for young readers, and it becomes clear that Szabó was able to satisfy many different tastes.
Though an apolitical writer, Szabó garnered recognition in communist Hungary from the beginning. She won the Attila József award twice (1959 and 1972), the Kossuth Prize in 1978 and the Tibor Déry award in 1996, and received honorary doctorates from the Theological academy of Debrecen (1993) and the University of Miskolc (2001). She was a founding member of the Széchenyi literary academy. She was made honorary citizen of both Budapest and Debrecen and shortly before her death was decorated with the grand cross of merit of the Hungarian republic.
Szabó lost her husband Tibor in 1982, but continued writing and managed to retain and mesmerise her readers to the end. Apparently, she died in her favourite armchair with an open book on her lap.
· Magda Szabó, writer and playwright, born October 5 1917; died November 15 2007
Magda Szabo: Acclaimed author of 'The Door'
Thursday 22 November 2007 00:00 GMT
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The Independent Online
Magda Szabó, poet, dramatist, essayist and novelist: born Debrecen, Hungary 5 October 1917; married 1947 Tibor Szobotka (died 1982); died Debrecen 19 November 2007.
Magda Szabó was one of the giants of contemporary Hungarian literature, and best known to British readers as author of Az Ajtó (1987), translated into English in 2005 as The Door. Heaped with honours, in her native land and abroad, she was Hungary's most translated writer, with a following in 42 countries. Her gift was to explore universal human themes and contemporary political realities through finely observed portraits of private life.
Szabó was born into an old Protestant family in Debrecen, the "Calvinist Rome" of eastern Hungary, whose distinctive intellectual and moral traditions shaped her mind and underpinned her art. She began her literary career not as a novelist but as a poet. Having read Latin and Hungarian at the University of Debrecen, she spent the years of the Second World War teaching at a girls' boarding school in the city, and then in the country town of Hódmezõvásárhely. By 1945 she was a civil servant in the Ministry of Religion and Public Education.
But the publication of two volumes of verse, Barány ("The lamb", 1947) and Vissza az emberig ("Back to humanity", 1949), brought her to the attention of the newly installed Communist authorities. Awarded the prestigious Baumgarten Prize in 1949, she was immediately stripped of the honour (as a class enemy) and dismissed from her post. In the nine years of enforced silence that followed (evoked so memorably in The Door) she turned to the broader canvas of fiction.
Her first novel, Freskó ("Fresco", 1958), set the tone for much of what was to follow. Four generations of a puritan family gather for a funeral, where, through a series of intense inner monologues, a suffocating web of lies, prejudices and hypocrisies is explored, at the same time evoking almost the entire history of Hungary since 1860. Az õz ("The fawn", 1959) equally connects personal issues (the heart-searchings of a young actress involved with a married man) to public ones, the sufferings and privations of rural people through the inter-war years and into the Stalinist Fifties. Again the protagonist is a woman and an artist, presented with a blend of warm empathy and unwavering intelligence.
But Szabó has a lighter side too. In the same year as Fresco, a more innocent readership was delighted by the appearance of Bárány Boldiszar ("Lawrence the lamb"), moral tales in verse, while Mondják meg Zsófikának ("Tell young Sophie") spoke directly to younger teenage girls. Throughout her life Szabó continued to address audiences of all ages; indeed her most widely read book is Abigel ("Abigail", 1970), an adventure story about a schoolgirl boarding in eastern Hungary during the war, popularised through a much-loved television series. Her Tündér Lala ("Lala the fairy",1964) is considered among the finest examples of juvenile fiction in the language.
Szabó also produced several plays, collected in 1975 under the title Az órák és a farkasok ("The wolf hours"), and in 1984 as Erönk szerint ("According to our strength") and Béla Király ("King Béla"). A sharp ear for dialogue graces all her novels. There are also collections of short stories and contributions to journals, and a moving tribute to her husband Tibor Szobotka, academic, novelist and translator of Tolkien and Galsworthy, who died in 1982.
No sooner had Szabó emerged from the political wilderness than the Party, having done all it could to strangle both her career and that of her husband, awarded her one of Hungary's top literary prizes, the József Attila (1959). The bitter ironies and moral heart-searchings this brought are probed indirectly through one of her very finest works, The Door.
In it, a novelist remarkably like Magda Szabó herself is unexpectedly returned to political favour. To cope with the sudden flurry of attention this brings, she hires a dour peasant woman to help out in her nice new flat, in a leafy suburb of Budapest. The woman is ferociously eccentric, at times arguably quite mad, but over the decades a strange bond of love grows up between them, creating a terrible mutual dependence. Then the writer is awarded "The Prize", at just the moment when the old servant lies dying in squalor behind her locked front door. Torn between her personal obligations and the glamour of state recognition, she concocts an unworkable plan to "save" the old lady and drives off to bask in glory. As a study of the intimate squirmings and private horrors of guilt, the novel has few equals.
In 2004 The Door (La Porte, in its French translation by Chantal Philippe) won the Prix Femina Etranger for women's writing in France, while the English version (by Len Rix, 2005) was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2006 and awarded the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
The other novels for which Magda Szabó will be most remembered are probably Pilátus (1963), Katalin utca ("Katalin Street",1969) (both available in French translations by Chantal Philippe), together with Ókut ("The ancient well", 1970) and Régimódi Történet ("An old-fashioned tale", 1971). The latter two return to the preoccupation with the inner workings of the traditional family, based closely on Szabó's own, while Pilátus tells of a well-meaning daughter who takes charge of her mother's life when she is widowed in the country, brings her to Budapest and sets her up in a flat, without once consulting the old lady's wishes. It is a ruthless exploration of the damage we inflict on one another in the name of love.
Katalin utca, or Rue Katalin in its 2003 French translation, is another recent prize-winner, awarded the 2007 Prix Cevennes for the "best European novel to appear in translation this year". It concerns three families, pursuing happily interconnected lives in adjacent houses in Budapest before and during the war. One is Jewish: when the parents "disappear", the other families try but fail to protect the daughter who has been left in their care. As a result their lives are irreparably blighted.
Once again Szabó explores the interconnectedness of the private and public spheres, but with a remarkable difference. As the book progresses the central consciousness becomes that of the murdered Jewish girl, now moving in a grey afterlife between the "next world" and this – a device that might at first seem rather awkward, but which is beautifully handled and powerfully represents the continuity between events past and present.
Elected to the European Academy of Sciences (1985-90) and acclaimed for her international work in the ecumenical movement, Szabó was a supreme example of the embattled writer. Her devotion to her craft was passionate and lifelong. Fittingly, she died at four in the afternoon, shortly after her 90th birthday, with a book in her hand.
Iza's Ballad
263.32 (Aug. 8, 2016): p38.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Iza's Ballad
Magda Szabo, trans, from the Hungarian by George Szirtes. New York Review Books, $16.95 trade paper (336p) ISBN 978-1-68137-034-7
In this contemplative family narrative, Szabo (The Door) introduces us to Ettie, and her daughter, Iza, shortly after Ettie's husband, Vince, dies. Set in Hungary in 1960, the novel follows housewife Ettie in the days and weeks after Vince's death. Iza, a successful doctor, tries to comfort her mother by arranging everything, but her efforts to tidy up her father's estate only further isolate Ettie. Iza sells the rural family home and brings her mother to live with her in the big city of Pest. There, with live-in help, Ettie has no chores to complete and no one to talk to. "Everything required for comfort was present and correct but she still felt as though she had been robbed." The story jumps around in time as Ettie nostalgically recalls her many years with Vince. Ettie is also fond of Antal, Iza's ex-husband, who purchases their old home in the village, and she worries that Iza will never find a suitable replacement. Antal, however, falls in love with Lidia, the young nurse who cared for Vince in his final days. A subdued and melancholy meditation on grief and mourning, Szabo's novel is the work of a sophisticated story-teller who confronts how memories are constructed. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Iza's Ballad." Publishers Weekly, 8 Aug. 2016, p. 38. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460900338&it=r&asid=034efe4d427e3b0fa218c41790f1e9ba. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460900338
The Door
261.48 (Nov. 24, 2014): p49.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Door Magda Szabo, trans. from the Hungarian by Len Rix. New York Review Books, $16.95 trade paper (288p) ISBN 978-1-59017-771-6
In this poignant but long-winded novel by the late Hungarian author Szabo, a writer recounts her decades-long relationship with--and eventual betrayal of--her enigmatic and emotionally volatile housekeeper. The story opens in postwar Hungary, narrated from old age by the protagonist, who remains unnamed for much of the novel. After having their careers "politically frozen," the narrator and her husband (also a writer) begin to work again and seek out domestic help for their new home in Budapest. They hire Emerence Szeredas, a local peasant with an air of authority and "strength like a Valkyrie." Though Emerence initially proves an antagonistic worker--attacking the narrator's belief in God, for instance--she eventually develops a deep affection for, and reliance upon, her employers. Over the years, she reveals secrets about her childhood and her peripheral involvement in Hungary's troubled political past, ultimately inviting the narrator into her apartment, which she notoriously--and suspiciously--protects. Szabo is a master tension builder, and Emerence's demise (foretold in the novel's opening pages) is heartbreakingly rendered. But an abundance of unnecessary detail weighs down what is otherwise a lucid and politically intriguing character study. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Door." Publishers Weekly, 24 Nov. 2014, p. 49. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA393098220&it=r&asid=258d4c6a65d3e153ae26dd670ab87e29. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A393098220
Magda Szabo. Fur Elise
Clara Gyorgyey
77.3-4 (October-December 2003): p103.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Magda Szabo. Fur Elise. Budapest. Europa. 2002. 420 pages. 1,800 Ft. ISBN 963-076820-8
MAGDA SZABO, the eighty-year-old empress of Hungarian literature (poet, playwright, scholar, critic, and Nobel Prize nominee), has become famous as a novelist. Since the 1970s she has incorporated much of her life into her fiction. Ostensibly, however, descriptions of her youth have been missing in her autobiographical oeuvre. Now, at long last, a unique confession has been born: in the spirit of St. Augustine and even Rousseau, Szabo opens all the locks and unleashes an incisive story of her life--peopled with family, friends, and teachers--and the surrounding world from 1927 to 1935. (This is the first of a planned two volumes.)
The author offers this brutally honest mini-Bildungsroman as a birthday present to the reader (i.e., as a new novel after twelve years), one that portrays the emergence of a writer amid the vicissitudes of a fascinating era, shaped by friends and foes. By now, she claims, she has been liberated, "I can afford to unveil all the secrets, uncover all the skeletons, blurt out the absolute truth even if it 'blackens' the memory of my own image." In the process, she has created a glowing, impressive tapestry that strikes us as uncommonly beautiful, disquieting, and original.
The title does not purport to connote anything romantic; instead, the lack of other allusions to this musical gem allows each person to hear her own message from Beethoven. For Szabo, her impetus was to present the true tale of her early years, an epoch that had been "shrouded in foggy mist and cold silence." The reconstruction of the past seven decades proved to be a Herculean task. She is alone, the sole witness left; everyone else has died, and "nothing but the exterior walls stand unchanged of the famous 'Lady-Factory Doczy/the Calvinist Finishing School." Its memory has only been preserved by the few alumnae still alive. Thus, as previously, Szabo is on her own again, as if it had been her destiny.
The book jacket names Cili, "the adopted Trianon orphan," as the book's heroine; in effect, it is the narrator, Magda, who is the fulcrum, the center of both family and school. The noble, ethereal Cili is an almost mythical creature--"blond, blue-eyed, sweet and compassionate'--who sings like an angel. Everyone adores her, whereas Magda constantly evokes contempt, irrational outrage, envy, jealousy, fear, and disbelief. She is unbearably haughty, selfish, conceited, cruel, spoiled, and stubborn, "a nasty little frog, a brown-nose, a know-it-all, read-it-all, goody-goody student." (No self-deception here!) Verily, she emerges as a genius who has spoken fluent Latin with her father since childhood; writes poems, plays, and novels as a child; and reads more than an educated adult. But her compulsive "truth-telling" and unique, roaming imagination constantly get her into huge troubles, creating widespread scandals. All her emotions (affections and hatred) are invariably "as sea-deep as her disappointments were suffocating, almost fatal."
Once again we meet the magical Szabo parents (they had often been featured previously): the mesmerizing, smart, and beautiful mother; the brilliant but totally unworldly father, a magistrate; worshiping Magda, they both had sworn to give their only child total freedom and all the knowledge they could offer. Lenke and Ede Szabo also act as "loving but firm judges at the frequent Magda-Trials." The chronological narration of school years, the daily minidramas, beloved and despised teachers, incidental relatives, real and fantasized lovers populate the meticulously depicted setting of post-World War I Debrecen, the Calvinist stronghold of Hungarian patriotism and puritanical propriety.
The author's forte is her penetrating psychological analyses as she probes her own and others' motives, inner turmoil, and suffering, all through the prism of a precocious teenager beset by the "unbearable lightness of being." As in her other works, passion is a preexisting condition--the role of time and place is crucial only to the way that passion plays out. For Szabo, boring, empty humans simply do not exist.
The flotsam and jetsam of political change, human vanity, and plain bad luck all play a part in creating the infinitely variable avenues of loss Szabo portrays so eloquently. As this anti-Arcadian childhood unfolds, the story vibrates with magic and endless formative possibilities, like the innocent visions of Magda and Cili. The main purpose of this stirring volume is to write back into the author's life story the chapters (Magda's scandalous young nature) and persons (Cili and her star-crossed love) that had been hitherto left out, but not by oversight. The final outcome is an affecting coming-of-age story of two girls whose destinies are lyrically foreshadowed: "One is only a short-term celestial visitor in this world, the other, the guardian of a vanished world burrowing among forgotten events; both ultimately redemptive." Indelibly influenced by Freud, Szabo acts as a catalyst for a classic novel of epiphany. The narrator gives her interpretations of what has happened but then uses metaphor and vague opinions insinuating more than words can express, unleashing the reader's imagination.
The style, laced with gentle humor and verbal inventiveness, is as glowing and unforgettable as her characters. The self-irony, the detached gestures with which she interrupts herself, the muted fury she gets off her chest in overlong sentences, the moral seriousness and ethical anguish--all are hallmarks of this definitive volume. Cili's interpretation of the eponymous Beethoven piece ultimately becomes Szabo's own motto: "Think of me when I'm gone--often, very often!" This is a milestone both in Hungary's belletristic literature and in the genre of the memoir.
Clara Gyorgyey
Yale University
Gyorgyey, Clara
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gyorgyey, Clara. "Magda Szabo. Fur Elise." World Literature Today, vol. 77, no. 3-4, 2003, p. 103+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA114488362&it=r&asid=f1af27d44fc27ae7e6d50979513f3195. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A114488362
Mezescsok Cerberusnak
74.1 (Winter 2000): p205.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2000 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Magda Szabo. Mezescsok Cerberusnak. Budapest. Osiris. 1999. 197 pages. 1,100 Ft.
Magda Szabo's career as a writer of fiction is among the most spectacular ones in the second half of this century. Ever since the publication of her first novel in 1958, she has hardly left the best- seller list in her native Hungary, and (according to the latest literary encyclopedia) she is still the most often translated Hungarian author. Her advanced age does not stop her from producing excellent new writing, and lately she has established herself in genres other than the novel, writing plays and essays as well as short stories. Her recent collection of stories Mezescsok Cerberusnak (Honey-Cakes for Cerberus) was published for the annual Book Week in June 1999, and I would not be surprised to hear that it has already sold out.
The stories in Szabo's new book could be classified as "tales from her childhood" and "mythological tales." The first type of story usually presents a memorable episode from the writer's childhood in Debrecen, something connected with the Szabo family or with its friends and acquaintances, a story reminiscing about people no longer alive whom the writer's skill "resurrects" for the readers. Such a tale is "zseni" (Eugenie), from which we learn why the author dislikes wearing anything around her neck and why a certain aunt was exiled from the family's memory store. There is plenty of comedy in stories such as "Az ozvegyek ebedje" (A Meal of Widows) and genuine tragedy in two stories which strike the reader as small masterpieces: "A nyar tanui" (Witnesses of the Summer) and "Terez esztendeje" (Teresa's Year). Here the protagonists are not just fading images from the past but characters full of blood and passion whose demise makes us contemplate the futility of high hopes and the brevity of intensely lived life. Szabo's "magic realism" does not ignore social barriers, and in fact most conflicts in her stories are played out against a clearly delineated social background. Human destiny is represented as individual ambition clashing with tradition, prejudice, or social prohibitions.
Among the "mythological stories" are two dealing with biblical events, inasmuch as one can call miracles happening in Herod's court a real event, or the vision that the newborn Jesus has of his life an "event" ("That Beautiful, Bright Night..."). A third one, "Vendeg almaval" (Guest with an Apple), uses the well-known modern technique of beginning a story without naming the protagonists, or rather identifying them only at a particular stage of the narration. All we know at the outset is that there are two sisters, a brunette and a blond, and that the latter is particularly beautiful; after a while it transpires that they are called Clytemnestra and Helen, and that the guest whose arrival is discussed (he comes with an apple!) is none other than that conceited young prince, Paris. In other words, what we have seen was the prelude to one of the greatest stories of our civilization, the Trojan War, related from the point of view of Helen's family.
For it is the family that forms the focus of Magda Szabo's writing experience. Her latest collection ends, suitably, with a fictitious letter written to a never-born child, to a son who should have been named Virgil, and it contains useful advice on the proper conduct of a person who has the gift and the stamina to follow the writer's profession. The last piece of advice is that when we set out on our journey toward artistic creation, we should always keep a companion by our side, a faithful dog called "Doubts." No real writer can do without self-doubts, without constant anxiety as to whether he or she has done his or her best; yet writing is a marvelous adventure, well worth undertaking. It is rewarding for the author, and even more so (certainly in Magda Szabo's case) for the reader.
George Gomori
University of Cambridge
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Mezescsok Cerberusnak." World Literature Today, vol. 74, no. 1, 2000, p. 205. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA62656117&it=r&asid=a7627082fd25237e64531bc1acf524f1. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A62656117
The Door
Clara Gyorgyey
69.4 (Autumn 1995): p835.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1995 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Magda Szabo, the seventy-eight-year-old queen of Hungarian literature (poet, scholar, critic, Nobel Prize nominee), gained world renown through her novels and their unique, unforgettable heroines. Though not a feminist, she succeeded in redirecting the focus on women through her powerful prose.
I killed Emerence. It doesn't change anything that I wanted not to destroy her but to save her."Thus begins The Door, featuring two strong women. Magda, the famous writer, and Emerence, her housekeeper, archetypes of the thinker and the doer respectively, both consumed by excessive dignity, love (albeit of different kinds), and a powerful sense of responsibility. Their odd bond, forming and unfolding in the seamy ambience of communism, will eventually culminate in a drama of classical magnitude.
The symbolic title refers to several doors: a real one, shutting Emerence's house and her secret within@ a metaphysical one, locking the terrain of our emotions @whose opening always portends some risks) and a nightmare door that never yields, now haunting the writer. Verily, by prying open the secret door, Magda destroys her irreplaceable "guardian angel."
While analyzing the vicissitudes of their ambivalent relationship (and their respective worlds) Szabo draws a shockingly accurate psychological portrait of her most unique character (and a mildly restrictive society). A composite of mythical deities (Shiva, Gea, Demeter, Earth Mother?), Emerence (meaning "full of virtues" in Latin) is not really a servant of Magda and the neighborhood (cleaning homes and sidewalks with meticulous passion but rather a tough sovereign: no one contradicts or questions her decisions everyone, bag women and colonel's alike, obeys her tyrannical dicta of love. Under her rule and her magical fingers, flowers grow, animals are cured, delicious feasts emerge, and rare medicines are found and delivered to the sick, lace for the sufferer (even assistance in suicide), money for the needy, havens for the homeless (humans and animals alike. Her life exemplifies how to stand firm in crisis, when to speak and when to remain silent, what's proper to give or accept, how much can be tolerated and what ought to be avenged. As only the chosen few are capable, Emerence knows indeed how to live and how to die.
Emerence is surrounded by mystery: her past is unknown, and so is the interior of her flat. As their intense "friendship" deepens, she unveils bits of her past. Unspeakable horrors and tragedies come to the surface: the violent deaths of her twin, her parents, and her lover (as in Nordic ballads); hunger and squalor; abuse by her primitive relatives; rape by Nazis and Russians. Yet, like Mother Teresa, she risked her reputation (to save a Jewish child, she claims the baby as her own) and her life by hiding deserters, partisans, fleeing Germans, illegal communists, stray cats -- whoever or whatever needed protection. Now getting old, she is paranoid about becoming ill, incapacitated, and eventually "found out." She wants to die alone, her secrets (nine cats!) with her. The writer is instructed how to act, but when the crucial time comes, Magda inadvertently betrays her) Emerence opens her doors, gets "violated," her myth evaporates amid filth, stench, and decay, the cats escape and die -- the inevitable doom accelerates. Magda, the ever-busy celebrity who fails to carry out any of the requested rites for her "ersatz mother" meets the traitor's fate: a perpetual persecution of guilt.
Szabo's style (the text is brilliantly translated!), laced with gentle humor, is as mesmerizing as are her characters. Her dexterous, self-ironizing distance (the autobiographical elements are obvious), the detached gestures with which the narrator interrupts herself, the muted fury that erupts in overlong or half-sentences, and a certain moral seriousness and ethical anguish also impregnate this gem of a novel. Ultimately, the text is a tranquil memento, a piece of irrefutable poetry, a bizarre counterpart to our universal betrayal -- out of love. The illustrations (a must for cat lovers) are done by the translator Stefan Draughon, a psychologist and artist by profession.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gyorgyey, Clara. "The Door." World Literature Today, vol. 69, no. 4, 1995, p. 835+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA17839171&it=r&asid=8405e05ddc2f5cb5b47044989b2f1b0f. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A17839171
Magda Szabo, a Hungarian novelist once silenced, speaks again in a new book
Roxana Robinson
(Oct. 20, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Washington Post
Byline: Roxana Robinson
The Hungarian writer Magda Szabo became a literary star here last year, with the first American publication of her unsettling novel, "The Door." Szabo, who died in 2007 at the age of 90, lived much of her life under totalitarianism. She received early acclaim as a poet, but in 1949 the communist regime prohibited her from publishing. In 1958, she was politically rehabilitated and became one of Hungary's most esteemed and popular authors.
Szabo's novel, "Iza's Ballad," written in 1963 but newly published here, addresses the relationship between the past and the future, asking whether they are interlocking and interdependent, or fundamentally opposed. It was an important question. In the mid-20th century, the future made a radical break from the past: new technologies changed the way everything looked and worked. And Stalinist communism created a new political society, one that was orderly, efficient and uncluttered by dissent. Modernism became a cultural movement, blotting out the past.
Szabo's novel explores the intersection of people and history, considering the ways in which the new affects the soul.
The book is in some ways the quintessential domestic novel, centered on family and home. It involves marriage, furniture, pets and cleaning ladies. But the genius of fiction is that any novel can encompass the world. This one raises some of the great questions, those that address the nature of trust, love and compassion.
At the core of the book is a nuclear family: aging parents, Vince and Ettie, and their daughter Isabella (Iza). Iza has always been brilliant and brave. Years ago, Vince was punished by the regime, fired from his job and shunned by his neighbors. As a small child, Iza was his ferocious protector. Now an adult, skilled in negotiating the modern state, she helps her elderly parents navigate this new world.
The book opens with Ettie, alone in the house, toasting a piece of bread inside a wood-burning stove. She owns an electric toaster, but prefers the warmth, immediacy and comfort of the fire. Iza sent her the toaster, but Ettie hid it in a cupboard. She doesn't trust it. Actually, Ettie doesn't trust electricity.
And so begins the story of a woman beating back into the past, borne ceaselessly into the future.
Iza is now a respected doctor. She married a classmate, the beloved Antal, and they moved in with Vince and Ettie, and practiced in the village hospital. When, inexplicably, the marriage ended, Iza moved to an apartment in Pest. From a distance, she's still her parents' champion and protector, visiting often, advising and assisting.
Vince has cancer, and is now in the hospital. Antal has him in his charge. Ettie visits daily, carrying his favorite things in her string bag.
As the book opens, Ettie, holding the toasting fork, answers the doorbell. Antal stands outside. He doesn't speak, only looks at her. Then he takes her arm with a clumsy gesture. Ettie knows what this means: The life she has known is over.
One of the strengths of this book lies in the way it moves smoothly back and forth through time. Ettie's memories, like a rising tide, fill the unknown spaces in the text. Walking home later from the hospital, she cuts through the park, remembering the times she and Vince walked there when they were courting. It was then a bosky refuge, though it's been modernized. But her memories are as real as the contemporary narrative, so the story moves forward through a series of intimate moments, both past and present.
Ettie's whole life, like all of ours, is made up of a mosaic of these intimate moments, scenes and gestures colored by emotion. The objects in her house -- the toasting fork, the stove -- so deeply familiar, are more than just a part of her life; they are its texture.
Szabo's understanding of this is one of the things that moors the story and gives it gravitas. She knows the way the contents of a house echo and create a life, the way we depend on them. When Vince dies, Ettie covers the mirror with her shawl, in deference to death. But Iza pulls down the shawl to cover her mother's shoulders, in deference to life. The bright exposed mirror is painful for her to see, but Ettie trusts Iza's instincts. Iza is opposed to the past, she lives in the modern world.
Through these moments we learn the history of Vince and Ettie's marriage, and the reason for Antal and Iza's divorce. Each moment reveals a new part of a landscape that widens, expands and shocks. As in "The Door," this novel delivers truths that humble us. Szabo's deep understanding of the workings of the family, and of the ways in which we deceive ourselves, and, most of all, her compassion, make the book a quiet but perilous venture into the depths of the human heart.
Roxana Robinson'smost recent book is the novel "Sparta."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Robinson, Roxana. "Magda Szabo, a Hungarian novelist once silenced, speaks again in a new book." Washingtonpost.com, 20 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA467797948&it=r&asid=3c8cba4e6de0c72d04ada4d1cb11dce5. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A467797948
April 29, 2016
The Hungarian Despair of Magda Szabó’s “The Door”
By Cynthia Zarin
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To read the Hungarian writer Magda Szabó’s “The Door” is to feel turned inside out—as if our own foibles have been written in soap on the mirror, to be read when we wake up from the trance of our own self-importance.
To read the Hungarian writer Magda Szabó’s “The Door” is to feel turned inside out—as if our own foibles have been written in soap on the mirror, to be read when we wake up from the trance of our own self-importance. Credit Photograph by INTERFOTO / Alamy
On a recent cold, rainy Friday afternoon, I met my friend, whom I’ll call Nell—a small, compact, unflappable person with a halo of gold hair who ran away to join the circus when she was young. Nell was reading a book. When she raised her eyes from the page, she looked like someone who had stepped back from the curb at the very last moment before being hit by a bus. The book she was reading was a paperback novel with a pale gray cover, by the Hungarian writer Magda Szabó, called “The Door.” It was first published in Hungary, in 1987, then here in 1995, and was reissued last year, in a new translation by Len Rix. A few weeks ago, in The New York Review of Books, Deborah Eisenberg referred to the “white-knuckled experience” of reading it. Writing about “The Door,” in the Times, the writer Claire Messud, who, like Eisenberg, found the book mesmerizing, went so far as to say, “It has altered the way I understand my own life.”
Magda Szabó, who died in 2007, at the age of ninety, was one of Hungary’s best-known writers, although very few of her works have been published in English. (This year, The New York Review imprint will also publish a new translation of “Iza’s Ballad,” from 1963.) She was born into a Protestant family in Debrecen, Hungary’s second-largest city, in the northeast corner of the country, and went to university there. After graduation, she taught classics at a Calvinist girls’ school. In 1945, she began working in in the Ministry of Education, and two years later she married Tibor Szobotka, a writer who was the Hungarian translator of James Joyce and George Eliot, among others. The couple had no children. Her first book of verse, “The Lamb,” was published that same year. She followed it with a second collection, “Back to the Human,” and in 1949 was awarded the Baumgarten Prize, one of Hungary’s most prestigious literary awards. The prize was rescinded on the same day: she had been named as an “enemy of the people” by the recently installed Communist Party.
Szabó was fired from the Ministry. During the Stalinist rule of Hungary, from 1949 to 1956, she was not allowed to publish her work. Since then, her books have been published in forty-two countries; in 2003, the French translation of “The Door” won France’s Prix Femina Étranger. In Hungary her novel “Abigél,” which was published in 1970, was made into a popular television show, in 1978, and was ranked sixth in Hungary’s version of “The Big Read,” which followed the BBC model of the hundred favorite books of all time. Other books in the top ten included “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” and “The Lord of the Rings.” In 1999, at a cold windy day at the Budapest Book Fair, long lines of people waited at an outdoor booth for Szabó to sign copies of her book. The other day, my sixteen-year-old daughter was lamenting the end of “Downton Abbey,” which had occupied many Sunday nights of her childhood, and we found an article online called “Downton Abbey: What to Watch Next Now That It’s Over.” If there was a similar article about what to read once you’ve finished Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, “The Door”—though it lacks the scope of those books, coming in under two hundred pages—might top the list.
“The Door” is about a writer, who is the narrator, who lives in a village in Hungary, with her husband, who is also a writer. Their work has been banned; before the start of the book, the ban has been lifted. Now that she will be able to write again, and there will be other demands competing with her household for her attention, the writer realizes that she will need domestic help. Almost immediately, she is presented with an older woman, Emerence, who is the kind of person who would affectionately be called “the Mayor” in a small town. She cooks and cleans for people in the village, she minds children, she sweeps the snow off the street in winter. She knows everyone’s business. She holds court on the scrubbed porch outside her house. No one is allowed past her closed front door, although a smell of disinfectant leaks out over the lintel.
The narrator learns that she is not interviewing Emerence for a job; Emerence will decide, in due course, whether she will work for her. After all, she doesn’t do everyone’s dirty laundry. While the novel is set in a village, and is populated by various village types, like a parable—the kind cop, the good nephew, the sad seamstress—only four characters, three of them human—the narrator, her husband, and Emerence—figure in this story. Indeed, we learn very little about the marriage, or the narrator’s husband, nor about her husband’s seemingly grave illnesses. Instead, the book is dominated by the narrator’s intense interest in ferreting out the details of Emerence’s story and Emerence’s passionate attachment to the fourth figure in the story, a dog, who has been inadvertently acquired by the writer and her husband when they find it abandoned on Christmas Eve. (I have some affinity with this part of the story, having acquired two cats in a similar manner.) The dog, whom Emerence insists on calling Viola, although it is male (later we find out why), immediately attaches itself fervently to Emerence, and the narrator—who really does not care a whit about the dog—is jealous at any deep affection that is not aimed in her direction.
As in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, Szabó is writing about a writer who despite domestic and other difficulties—some of which are historical predicaments that affect domestic life—is trying to write, and like those books, “The Door” revolves around the relationship of two women, one of whom is telling the story and may or may not be a reliable narrator. Like Lila, the brilliant friend in the Neapolitan quartet, Emerence is a mystery to the writer, impenetrable, existing with her secrets behind a locked door, a woman of extraordinary gifts—there are hints of this throughout the novel—who has chosen to fetter her own wings.
Those who clean other people’s houses for a living or help raise children learn many secrets. For a long time I relied on one person whom I thought of as a friend to clean my house, and another to help raise my children. In the first instance—I thought—the relationship was straightforward, but it was not. In the second, I knew it was not. By the time my youngest child was in her care, my marriage was breaking up and she witnessed scenes and was the receiver of confidences. There were moments when my child was with her when I did not know where she was, exactly. I insisted that those moments must cease and when she refused, I removed my child from her sphere. (Did I really ever think my child was in danger? No, it was the principle of the thing, I told myself, a phrase I find myself falling back on when the ground under my feet is shaky.) She vanished from our lives for a time, to the distress of my child, who quite rightly thought then that she was left in the care of two squabbling children.
I thought of this time, now past, reading “The Door.” To read it is to feel turned inside out—as if our own foibles have been written in soap on the mirror, to be read when we wake up from the trance of our own self-importance. In a short introduction, the British novelist Ali Smith suggests that Emerence may indeed be Hungary itself. If so, the novel is also about how despite our own wishes to be free of history, our own agency is curtailed by our time and circumstances: in the novel, Emerence’s great calamity would have occurred, after all, whether the narrator was there to witness it or not.
The book, which closely parallels events in Szabó’s own life, begins and ends with a dream; it reads like one, too—a fever dream, the shadow of a shadow. When I read the Ferrante series, in one fell swoop, it seemed to me as I sped from book to book as if Lenu and Lila were two halves of the same person, one that went forward, and the other who remained in the landscape of childhood, with access to the past’s terrible power. “The Door” is a bone-shaking book. At moments of crisis—-one involves an actual bolt of lightning, another, the consumption of a stupefying meal—the reader experiences a sensory ricochet. It is as if you are watching someone being run over by a car—bad enough—and at the same time you are the victim under the wheel, and then, triply implicated, also the driver of the car, backing up to run over the person in the road once more. It’s hallucinatory and confounding. Reading, you think: this can’t be happening. And of course, it isn’t happening. It’s a book. But is it? Did it?
Finishing “The Door,” I found myself wondering about Szabó’s husband, who died in 1982, at the age of sixty-eight. In the photographs I could find, he looks ill and frail, but lit with an intense inner life. Two years after his death, a story by Szobotka called “Animal Lovers,” translated by Stephen Sass, appeared in The Iowa Review. While the family in the story has been given some children, the characters are a husband, a wife, an elderly woman here called Aunt Minnie, and a dog, here called James. Aunt Minnie and the dog are both dead, but at night they return to the house, one barking, and the other knitting. One night, only Aunt Minnie returns. Where is the dog? they ask. Those who are loved in this world are taken care of in the next, Aunt Minnie explains, then says, “But I will come in the future, too. Every night.” And so she remains, haunting them, as long as they live. As she did Szabó and Szobotka, and now us.
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Cynthia Zarin has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1983. She teaches at Yale. Her new book, “Orbit,” is a collection of poems.
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A Blinding Need for Each Other
Deborah Eisenberg
April 7, 2016 Issue
The Door
by Magda Szabó, translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix, with an introduction by Ali Smith
New York Review Books, 262 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Magda Szabó, Budapest, circa 2003
Bodo Gabor
Magda Szabó, Budapest, circa 2003
Magda Szabó, who died in 2007 at the age of ninety, was acclaimed and widely read in her native Hungary. She wrote in many forms—poetry, novels, plays, memoir, essays, and screenplays—and her work has been translated into many languages. Between 1949 and 1956 both she and her husband, the writer Tibor Szobotka, were prevented by the regime from publishing, and the award of an important prize to her was revoked on the same day it was bestowed. The Door, first published in 1987 in Hungarian, is unmistakably a work of fiction, with fiction’s allusive and ambiguous purposes and effects, but it is narrated in the first person by a writer and composed—perhaps almost entirely—of frankly autobiographical recollections.
One has the uneasy sensation that, through the medium of her fictional narrator, Szabó herself is whispering fiercely into our ear, asking our understanding and assistance as she attempts to resolve a punishing anxiety—a sensation that is explosively intensified when, toward the end of the book, a central character addresses the previously unnamed writer as Magdushka. “Only my parents had ever called me that. No-one else.”
The Door opens with the description of a recurrent nightmare, repeated in exact detail, in which the narrator expresses to herself her helplessness in the face of the death of someone named Emerence, and her anguish over what she believes to be her own—inadvertent—culpability. The dream elements are familiar, the narrator’s voice is pitiless—correct, astringent, brisk, and intimate—and the reader is likely to experience a faint physical echo of the condition one is in when one wakes from such a horror.
The story that leads up to the dream takes up the rest of the book, and its premise could hardly seem less suited to a dream’s reverberant overtones and equivocations: the narrator is a writer whose career has been politically frozen, as she puts it, but is now picking up again, and “it had become clear that if someone didn’t take over the housekeeping there would be little chance of my publishing the work I’d produced in my years of silence, or finding a voice for anything new I might have to say.” An acquaintance highly recommends Emerence, a woman from the neighborhood who is old but very strong and remarkably skillful:
Emerence had been rather brusque when asked to call round for a chat, so I tracked her down in the courtyard of the villa where she was caretaker. It was close by—so close I could see her flat from our balcony. She was washing a mountain of laundry with the most antiquated equipment, boiling bedlinen in a cauldron over a naked flame, in the already agonizing heat, and lifting the sheets out with an immense wooden spoon. Fire glowed all around her…. She radiated strength like a Valkyrie…. She had agreed to call, and so now we were standing here, in the garden….
Naturally, the writer offers this titanic representation of housework a job. Emerence hears her out, and then, instead of giving an answer on the spot as expected, astonishes the writer by announcing that she’ll ask around to ascertain whether the writer and her husband are people she’d consent to clean for, and she’ll deliberate. And then, when she’s ready, she says, she’ll return with her answer, whether it’s a yes or a no.
It won’t do to say much more about the plot of the book, first because the rather white-knuckled experience of reading it depends largely on Szabó’s finely calibrated parceling out of information, and second (though this might be something that could be said of most good fiction) because the plot, although it conveys the essence of the book, is a conveyance only, to which the essence—in this case a penumbra of reflections, questions, and sensations—clings.
But without doing damage to anybody, it’s possible to describe a few things about the relationship, begun there in the garden between the narrator and Emerence, that endures for twenty years and is so intense that the account of it crowds out almost everything else we might expect to learn about the narrator’s life. Information about her marriage, for example, or the vicissitudes of her personal and political history, or her husband, or relevant national traumas, or the elevated social circles to which she and her husband apparently belong, or films whose scripts she apparently writes, or her books, or her husband’s dangerous chronic illness, or her own frequent illnesses, or an immensely important literary prize she receives—all of which bear on the story in ways we are given to understand elliptically—this information is subordinate. Reading The Door is like being spun at varying velocities through a tube, beyond the translucent walls of which we can catch glimpses of the other characters involved in the drama, toward the gigantic, fascinating, and mysterious figure of Emerence.
The writer’s account of Emerence reveals as much about herself as it does about her subject, and the terms of their relationship have been set, we eventually realize, long before that first meeting in the garden. Although they now live in Pest, both women are from villages in the same region and both have been tossed about on the hairpin turns of recent economic and historical events. Otherwise, the two appear to have little in common.
Emerence is from a background of peasants and craftsmen. She is barely literate, brilliant, implacably proud, terrifyingly astute, unremittingly hardworking, fastidious, scornful, bizarrely reserved, and passionate.
The writer is well educated, intelligent, cultivated, from an old and prominent family, a devout Christian, slightly self-important, and equipped to observe herself with a certain, though perhaps insufficient, degree of irony. She is also progressive and idealistic, despite the hardships she has suffered at the hands of Hungary’s postwar Communist regime—the same regime from which Emerence, poor and from peasant stock, would have stood to gain greatly, if only she had deigned to accept training or an education.
The social determinants of behavior and mental experience could hardly be more graphically expressed than they are by these two women and their relationship, and there is plenty of room between them for paradoxical conflicts and misunderstandings so severe as to border on both the slapstick and the abusive. The ostensibly introspective, analytical narrator demonstrates plenty of automatic and unexamined class prejudices of the sort that she would probably be able to identify in others. About an episode during which she has been ill with worry and the previously aloof Emerence has taken care of her with complete competence and has distracted her from her troubles, the writer tells us:
It has always been important to me to lead a full emotional life: to have those who are closely connected to me show pleasure when we meet. Emerence’s perfect indifference the next morning didn’t exactly wound my pride, but was a disappointment after that surreal night, when she had stayed by my side and revealed her childhood self to me…. I truly believed that at last something had been resolved between us, that Emerence would no longer be a stranger but a friend: my friend.
The writer responds to this affront to her “full emotional life”—as she interprets Emerence’s failure to “show pleasure”—by quickly establishing Emerence in her imagination as the cliché of a brutish peasant—greedy, wily, ignorant, viciously anti-Semitic, entirely self-interested, and evasive; Emerence’s account on the preceding night of her childhood, which had transfixed the narrator (and the reader), is converted by the narrator’s resentment into “the sort of tale she must have heard from a fairground entertainer or found in a trashy novel in her grandfather’s attic.” This, when we remember the writer’s description of Emerence with the fire glowing all around her.
Emerence, for her part, loses few opportunities when stung to goad the writer—to point out that obtuseness and fatuous high sentiment are hazards of privilege. “People who don’t know you wouldn’t believe how clueless you are,” she says. And her opinions are maddeningly resistant to any argument:
Above all she hated the idle, lying gentry. Priests were liars; doctors ignorant and money-grabbing; lawyers didn’t care who they represented, victim or criminal; engineers calculated in advance how to keep back a pile of bricks for their own houses; and the huge plants, factories and institutes of learning were all filled with crooks.
By now, we were really shouting at each other; myself, like Robespierre, representing the power of the people—although it was in those years that they were doing their best to drive me to the point where I could no longer work, and send me to the ghetto I’d been assigned to with my husband (who had himself been so harassed and humiliated he couldn’t work at all)….
In Emerence’s view,
whoever happened to be in power gave the orders, and anyone giving orders, whoever it was, whenever, and whatever the order, did it in the name of some incomprehensible gobbledygook. Whoever was on top, however promising, and whether he was on top in her own interests or not, they were all the same, all oppressors. In Emerence’s world, there were two kinds of people, those who swept and those who didn’t….
On hearing the radio or television blaring out of people’s windows, if the tone was positive she immediately contradicted it, if negative, she praised it. She had no idea where any particular place might be found in the world, but she related news to me about various governments with impeccable pronunciation, reeling off the names of statesmen, Hungarian and foreign, and always with a comment: “They want peace. Do you believe that? I don’t, because who then will buy the guns, and what pretext will they have for hanging and looting? And anyway, if there’s never been world peace before, why should it happen now?”
The narrator’s initial summation of Emerence, tidy but hastily assembled, is rapidly dismantled, and, although it is replaced by others increasingly accurate, it is very difficult to get a consistent picture of Emerence into focus—she is too complex, too hidden, and on too large a scale to be easily apprehended. At moments, in fact, she seems to have attributes that are generally associated with divine presences; not only does fire glow around her as she handles a mountain of laundry with a gigantic wooden spoon, but she also demonstrates a shocking capacity for violence, a limitless compassion, directed indiscriminately toward those in need, and an uncanny ability to communicate with animals.
A small community of neighborhood characters figures in the narrative, sometimes rather like the chorus in a classical Greek play, but in fact the book’s premier character—aside from Emerence and the narrator—is a foundling dog that has been adopted by the narrator and her husband but whose heart belongs to Emerence. How exactly are we to understand this dog? The dog is a male, but Emerence, with no hesitation, names him Viola. We are told that Viola is remarkably intelligent, but that’s quite an understatement about a creature that acts almost as a messenger between the rational world and a world of subtle and precise comprehension unavailable to humans.
Clearly, despite Emerence’s idiosyncratic but refined sense of responsibility and her peerless housekeeping talents, the often quarrelsome and abrasive relationship between her and the narrator could be discontinued at any time—and in fact it’s occasionally interrupted by a silence on one side or the other.
But it’s not an inclination to quarrel that ties the two women together, in any case; what does is clearly a recognition of some sort—one that resides in the deepest part of the self. The conflicts between them tend to arise from a temporary disequilibrium of need, or from a reproach, usually unvoiced, concerning devotion inadequately reciprocated. It’s inevitable that each sometimes suffers from bruised feelings and that the two often misunderstand each other, because the need of each for the other is blinding.
The narrator’s tone of controlled exasperation—the feeling that within the pages there’s an insufficient margin of comfort—is elegantly expressed in the wonderful translation by Len Rix. It’s as though the story must at all costs be dragged from the darkness, and at times the brittle precision and airlessness create an atmosphere that’s feverishly hallucinatory and even horribly comic. At one point the dignity of an entire life is weighed against an imperious television crew honking the horn of a car that is to take the narrator to the studio in time to have her makeup done for the camera.
Sometimes baffling details lodge in one’s brain like shrapnel until we receive an explanation for them. Why, for example, does Emerence give a male dog the name Viola? And once, many years after Emerence’s death, when her nephew and the writer
met beside her grave and talked about how impossible it was to change her view of the world, the young man spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness…. I didn’t tell him about the lawyer’s son. I sensed that the cause of her rage somehow lay with him.
What lawyer’s son? We haven’t heard a word about such a person until this conversation. Eventually, we learn the answer to questions like this, many pages after they arise.
“We are all traitors,” the narrator laments. Her husband’s response is just as plausible: “Not traitors,” he says. “Just too many things to do.” The Door is like an enigmatic object with a seemingly simple shape that calls up a wealth of associations. Although it vividly depicts the cultural construction of attitudes, it concerns itself primarily with the mysteries of human connections beneath and beyond that—the mortal struggle to breach the gulf between oneself and another, the hundreds of rationales with which we console ourselves for failing truly to do so, and the heavy costs of love.
‘The Door’ by Magda Szabó
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Author Magda Szabó’s “The Door,” originally published in 1987, has been newly released in the US.
Bodo Gabor
Author Magda Szabó’s “The Door,” originally published in 1987, has been newly released in the US.
By Michele Filgate Globe Correspondent February 20, 2015
A confession of responsibility for a death in the first couple of pages of a novel takes readers down a well-trod path — but one that often proves gripping nonetheless. Sometimes there’s no easy way of ripping oneself away from such a fictional world — and this is especially the case when the characters themselves are ones that won’t release their hold on you.
“I killed Emerence,” Magda Szabó, the Hungarian author and narrator, writes in the first part of her novel, “The Door.’’ “The fact that I was trying to save her rather than destroy her changes nothing.” Newly released in the United States from NYRB Classics, the original edition of this celebrated work, widely viewed as semiautobiographical, was published in 1987.
This bold statement by the narrator, also named Magda, is only the beginning of the chronicle of her complicated relationship with Emerence, her housekeeper. Magda is an intellectual and a writer who spends most of the day toiling away at her typewriter.
Emerence, on the other hand, is something of a mystery from the outset. We learn that she is older than Magda but physically stronger than several people combined. She is largely uneducated, sweeps, cooks, and makes shrewd, if barbed, comments.
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Magda’s fascination with Emerence grows, and becomes a focus of the saga — and with good reason.
THE DOOR
Author:
Magda Szabó
Publisher:
NYRB Classics
Number of pages:
288 pp.
Book price:
$16.95
There are certain famous books whose central characters have become synonymous with them; one can’t think of “Great Expectations’’ without thinking of the tattered Miss Havisham, or “A Confederacy of Dunces’’ without thinking of the inimitable misfit Ignatius J. Reilly. “The Door’’ is centered around the magnificent Emerence, a “sole inhabitant of her empire-of-one, more absolute than the Pope in Rome.”
She is larger than life and full of contradictions. “She was fearless, enchantingly and wickedly clever, brazenly impudent,” Magda says. She is also intensely private. Like the door to her house, Emerence’s life remains closed to all, with the partial eventual exception of Magda.
The fact that Emerence’s name sounds so much like eminence doesn’t seem like a coincidence. She’s prominent in her town; a caretaker who looks after the world around her but to the detriment of herself refuses to allow anyone to care for her.
Emerence is a force of nature and often gets her way. Magda and her husband rescue a dog. But Emerence cares for it, training it to favor her over its masters. She likewise gives her employers a kitschy plaster dog she found on the street. They hate the thing and don’t want it in their house. But Emerence won’t relent. She stops working for them until they let her have her way, only to come back to the house and destroy the item herself.
She is also fearless about speaking her mind. She taunts and punishes. But she also imparts wisdom. When Magda brings her to a film set for a movie she’s working on, Emerence is outraged when she sees trees being manipulated for the camera. She insists on authenticity.
“She also demanded of me that, in my art, it should be real passion and not machinery that moved the branches,’’ Magda says. “That was a major gift, the greatest of her bequests.”
As Magda’s writing career takes off, she becomes more and more self involved. When the old lady becomes ill and refuses to leave her own home, the writer hesitantly knocks on her door and offers assistance. “I knew in advance that she would refuse, and when she did I was secretly glad, because there was no room in my life for anything more.”
But that’s the thing about Emerence: She is the kind of person who forces people to make room for her in their life, and in Magda’s case, that leads to a profound and meaningful relationship — one that will haunt her.
Michele Filgate, a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y., can be reached at mfilgate@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @readandbreathe.
In Magda Szabo’s Novel, a Widow Is Uprooted From What She Loves
By LAUREN GROFFNOV. 11, 2016
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Credit Melinda Beck
IZA’S BALLAD
By Magda Szabo
Translated by George Szirtes
328 pp. New York Review Books. Paper, $16.95.
The era we inhabit is a loud one, reader, and there are so many things calling to you — hurricanes darkening the sky, small children at your elbow, social media on your phone, apocalyptic nightmares sparked by yam-colored men — that the hours you give to a book are a tremendous gift of your attention. You may be forgiven if you start a book, find that something in the alchemy is off, and set it aside for something new. Books are products of the human imagination, as flawed as the people who make them, and it is not uncommon to feel an immediate and wordless animosity when you meet a new person. There’s no shame in being human.
So, a confession: Had I not agreed to write this review of Magda Szabo’s newly released novel “Iza’s Ballad,” I would have read 50 pages of the book and decided that it wasn’t for me. This would have been a sad mistake. I should have had more faith in New York Review Books, a small publisher that is a national treasure, responsible as they are for republishing or translating so many of the most astonishing books over the last two decades. Tove Jansson’s “The Summer Book,” Richard Hughes’s “A High Wind in Jamaica,” Renata Adler’s “Speedboat,” John Williams’s “Stoner”: These books and others make up a large percentage of my personal canon and that of many writers I know. I also should have had more faith in the Hungarian writer Magda Szabo, whose previous book published by New York Review Books, “The Door,” made me feel, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, as if the top of my head had been taken off. It is a claustrophobic, stunning novel about a housekeeper, Emerence, who is so powerful she’s like a giantess out of a fairy tale, and the intimacy and love that rages between her and the writer who employs her. The New York Times Book Review rightfully listed it as one of the 10 Best Books of 2015. Szabo died in 2007 and was no longer around to see the book’s success in America, but “The Door” won the Prix Femina Étranger, and its author was one of the most decorated and beloved of modern Hungarian writers.
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It is desperately unfair to compare two different books from the same novelist, as each book necessarily has a unique project. That said, a reader will always carry expectations gleaned from previous reading of a writer into her new work, and while “The Door” hooks you from the first line with its troubled first-person voice, “Iza’s Ballad” is convoluted from the start. We open into the consciousness of an old woman, the mother of Iza, when she is told that her husband has died after an illness. As the widow moves through her fresh grief, we splash in and out of other people’s points of view, as well as in and out of flashbacks of her life with her husband. She is bewildered, and her agitation infects the reader. The relationships between characters are defined only through slow accretion; the shifts between present time and past time aren’t delineated; and antecedents are often so buried that, in certain scenes for example, the reader has to sit for a long time with the text to puzzle out to which female character each pronoun “her” belongs. One example of a wobbly sentence comes perplexingly early, in the book’s third paragraph: “Her instinctive reaction was, however, governed by her more properly functioning good manners, which were a mixture of instinct and sound training.” Doubling down on instinct here buries the sentence’s meaning. I know no Hungarian and can’t speak to the quality of the translation by George Szirtes, who is widely renowned for excellence, having won the 2013 Best Translated Book Award for Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s “Satantango.” It’s not impossible that the fault lies with me, as I have taken three running leaps at “Satantango” and have yet to be able to scale that particular wall. But difficulties with syntax or clarity never once dragged my attention away from Len Rix’s translation of “The Door.”
In any event, only after the first section of the four-part novel is over — at about Page 70 — does the book grow teeth. And, my, what sharp teeth they are.
Iza is an excellent doctor, a dutiful and generous daughter who loves her aged parents, but who has left her tiny village and family far behind her when she moved to Budapest after a divorce. In the week after her father is buried, Iza, hoping to spare her mother pain, sends the widow off to a nearby spa, abruptly sells her parents’ house and most of their things, and, without bringing her mother back to the village to say her goodbyes, brings her to the Budapest apartment to live. In the big city, the widow is frightened and uprooted from everyone and everything she knows, including her best friend and her little dog. Her beloved housekeeping duties are taken from her, as Iza doesn’t like her mother’s heavy cooking and has hired an excellent housekeeper named Terez to take care of them both. Her mother’s timidity and wordless need begins to irritate Iza, though she loves her mother and is doing all she can imagine to help her.
The problem that arises is not in Iza’s good intentions or kindness, but in Iza’s very lack of imagination, a fatal absence of poetry in her soul. She can’t imagine that her own mother, a country woman, is nuanced, with a rich personal history she takes great pleasure in, and a fineness and gentleness that makes her burn with shame when she realizes what an imposition she is on her daughter. The book kept me in tears from a moment halfway through, when, on Terez’s birthday, the mother leaves an ugly coral brooch as a birthday present for the housekeeper, then flees. Terez has to go out on the streets to hunt for her. “Terez wanted to tell her off for making her worry like that but she couldn’t bear to, guessing that the old woman had been hiding from her to avoid the embarrassment of being thanked,” Szabo writes. “She gave her lunch and while serving it out, still with her back to her, feeling suddenly confused and shy, she thanked her for the gift. The old woman whispered something, her face and neck glowing with happiness.”
Szabo excels at summoning the delicate and wordless spaces between people who love each other; as the book goes on, the emotional layers build quietly and almost unbearably. You feel tragedy amassing, somehow, out of ineffable wisps of feeling. All along, Iza’s faultlessness — the very goodness and resolute forward thinking that make her as cold and admirable as a saint — is what leads to her sad and lonely end. Some books, like some people, require great patience and attention to fully understand their complexity and beauty. Szabo teaches us lucky readers this very lesson through “Iza’s Ballad,” one that perfect but songless Iza could never learn.
Lauren Groff is the author, most recently, of the novel “Fates and Furies.”
Review: In Iza’s Ballad, Magda Szabo delivers a compelling parable of mid-20th century progress
PASHA MALLA
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Oct. 28, 2016 11:45AM EDT
Last updated Friday, Oct. 28, 2016 11:45AM EDT
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Title Iza's Ballad
Author Magda Szabo, translated by George Szirtes
Genre fiction
Publisher New York Review of Books
Pages 352
The most iconic characters in Western literature – beginning with Odysseus, through Hamlet and Don Quixote, to Anna Karenina, Captain Ahab, Sherlock Holmes, Ebenezer Scrooge and Emma Bovary, and into the previous century with Jay Gatsby, Holden Caulfield and Lolita (right up to, I don’t know, Harry Potter?) – have one thing in common: They’re not much like real people at all, but grotesque extrapolations of human traits. And their scope as archetypes extends well beyond subsequent fictional creations to codify the world. “Quixotic,” after all, isn’t just a literary term, but a good description for anyone behaving in a well-intentioned but clueless way.
What is it about caricature that’s so affecting? “Every man’s a chasm,” Georg Buchner claims in Woyzeck. “It makes you dizzy when you look down in.” Applied to the novel, that vertiginous effect is amplified by fiction’s capacity to peer into a person’s psyche – male or female, naturally – with such depth and acuity to at once render them larger than life and precisely distill their inner experience. This sort of psychological and emotional access is, short of clairvoyance, otherwise unimaginable with another person; even our loved ones we can only know so well, but Jane Eyre tells us everything.
With this metric in mind, the greatest character I’ve encountered in a recent novel is without doubt Emerence in Magda Szabo’s The Door. First published in Hungarian in 1987, Len Rix’s 1995 translation for Vintage UK was re-released by the NYRB in 2015 to stateside acclaim. Emerence, the narrator’s housekeeper, is brilliantly wrought in all her eccentricities and contradictions: proud, stubborn, kind, wounded, fearsome and, ultimately, tragic. The portrait is so compelling and so vivid that there were times when I would look up from the book expecting to find her in the room with me.
Iza’s Ballad, originally published 24 years before The Door, shares many of that later novel’s themes: servitude, co-dependence, power, disgrace. Again, the story revolves around the generational divide between two women, Iza, a physician, and her mother, Ettie, and again Szabo mostly turns her remarkable powers of observation, insight and pathos on the senior of the two. Set in Hungary just after the Second World War, the book (which is enjoying a moment in the spotlight thanks to the NYRB, although a UK edition has been available to Canadian readers since 2014) uses this dynamic to explore the shift between old and new, per the rapid march into communism that consumed Eastern Europe through the middle of the 20th century.
The tone is anti-nostalgic, as the novel lurches alongside civilization into a bright and hopeful future. Of course, we as readers know how this will play out, and the story here is a familiar one. So when the family patriarch dies and Iza, forever the pragmatist, suggests that her mother abandon her country home – and past, and dog – to join her in the modernizing city, there’s painful irony to Ettie’s optimism: “What delight it must be to move to Budapest, to leave sad memories behind and to enjoy a happy old age in new circumstances … Iza would look after her, she’d have nothing to worry about for the rest of her life.”
Almost immediately upon relocating, Ettie – or, as she becomes known as the novel progresses, simply “the old woman” – turns adrift, her identity stripped from her, overwhelmed by a rapidly changing society she doesn’t understand. Out of step with the times, she clings to tradition, insisting on burning paraffin rather than using the coffee maker and distrusting the refrigerator for its lack of ice. When she is gifted a bird, Ettie sets it free – yet, with nowhere else to go, it roosts just beyond her windowsill: “It was like someone who had lost not only his home but all hope,” she thinks, incisively enough, “who had given himself over to fate.”
Meanwhile, Iza is a picture of ease and sophistication, completely at home in this brave new world: “How clever she was,” Ettie notes, “how charming, how polite, how well she knew what to say, when and to whom.” The ways in which Szabo explores the tension between mother and daughter will resonate with anyone who has suffered that terrible cycle of disproportionate, lunatic frustration with their parents, which, when expressed, instantly slithers into guilt and shame.
And this might be where Iza’s Ballad and The Door deviate. The Door was literally about unlocking the portal to another person’s hidden world, and as such the narrator’s personality was obscured by the massive shadow that Emerence casts over the book. But Iza’s Ballad relies on contrasts; Ettie exists fundamentally in relation, and opposition, to her daughter, not as a mystery to be plumbed and solved. Iza’s Ballad also resists a fixed perspective, sometimes dancing between characters’ points of view in the same scene, the result of which is a more diffuse focus than Szabo’s singular, exacting portrayal of Emerence.
As such, I don’t foresee “ettian” entering our everyday lexicon – though “emerential” has a certain ring to it – as Ettie doesn’t display that seemingly grandiose quality required for canonization. This is not to say that Iza’s Ballad isn’t full of finely drawn characters, or that the book itself isn’t compelling, affecting and a fascinating parable of mid-20th century progress. But it is more of a study of the spaces between people, and what those represent, than an examination of one person, herself, alone.
Iza's Ballad by Magda Szabo, trans. George Szirtes, book review: A Hungarian history of silence
Jonathan Gibbs
@tiny_camels
Thursday 7 August 2014 14:20 BST
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Secret lives: volumes can be gleaned from Madga Szabó's silences Getty Images
Madga Szabó was one of Hungary's pre-eminent novelists, suppressed during the Stalinist years, but hugely popular once the stranglehold of Socialist Realism had been relaxed in the late 1950s. Szabó is best known in translation for her 1987 novel The Door, which has now been followed with this, originally published in 1963 under the title Pilátus, which for the life of me I can't parse. Is it something to do with Pontius Pilate: washing your hands of guilt? Corrupt authority?
It is a slow, circling, rather opaque book that starts with one death, and ends with another. It treats four main characters: elderly husband and wife Vince and Ettie, their grown-up daughter Iza, and Iza's ex-husband Artal. Though its narrative covers just a few months in their lives, it manages, in its slow revolutions about their four poles, to reveal secrets about who each of them is, secrets that for the most part remain unknown to the others.
It is a book of gaps and silences, but the strangest silence of all is in what can be said about the realities of life under the threat of censorship – even when the reality being spoken of is not a Communist one. So we have Vince's hiding of a local Jew in his cellar during the German occupation; his earlier loss of his job as a judge for refusing to convict a quartet of peasants; and Iza, as a student during the Second World War, smuggling grenades in her briefcase: all these events are passed quickly over, without explanation.
The history of Hungary in the 20th century looms large, but you feel that Szabó's native readers would have gleaned volumes from her silences and movings-on. What we get today is still something rather impressive: a meditation not on grief as such, but on carrying on, a teasing out of the adage about teaching old dogs new tricks.
When Vince dies from cancer, Ettie expects nothing more from life than a solitary decline of her own, so she is delighted when Iza insists on uprooting her from the rural family home and installing her in her own apartment in Budapest. But soon Ettie is reduced to spending her days travelling the city's trams, happy when she is able to return home.
The tightness with which the characters observe each other make this a slightly claustrophobic read, but it certainly holds you once it has its claws in you, and, in George Szirtes' elegant translation, feels absolutely as if it could have been written yesterday.
The 'Ballad' of Magda Szabo
Magda Szabo
Magda Szabo, author of "Iza's Ballad." (Bodo Gabor photo)
Kathleen RooneyChicago Tribune
New York Review of Books Classics did English-speaking readers an enormous service when it published Hungarian writer Magda Szabo's tense and rending "The Door" in 2015, and it has us another with this fall's release of her elegiac and elemental novel, "Iza's Ballad."
Szabo, who was born in 1917 and died in 2007, is one of Hungary's most respected and prolific writers, authoring 50 books over the course of her lifetime. This superb translation by George Szirtes comes with a translator's note in which he considers the book's timely yet eternal themes: "What to do with the old? What to do with parents or grandparents who can't cope with modern life but cling to lost ways of acting and feeling? What, for that matter, will our children do with us?"
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Szirtes also offers cultural context, noting how Stalin's oppressive post-World War II regime stymied Hungary's citizens and brightest writers alike, and how Szabo herself was "declared a class alien and banned from publishing anything but children's literature," a surprisingly common sanction in that era.
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Originally published in 1963, "Iza's Ballad" takes place in this repressive and uncertain atmosphere of a nation grappling with identity and large-scale change, telling the story of a mother, Ettie, and her daughter, Iza, both of whom have the best of intentions but can't escape the political and technological circumstances of their historical moment.
Uneducated but competent, mannerly and kind, Ettie is old-fashioned and superstitious to such an extent that when the story opens — "The news arrived just as she was toasting bread" — we learn that she doesn't trust the toaster given to her by her daughter, preferring to cook in the open stove, and that she doesn't even feel fully confident in electricity. The news she receives is that Vince, her beloved husband of 49 years and a politically blacklisted county judge who suffered for decades for his commitment to justice, is in the final throes of his death from cancer. Ettie's life will never be the same.
Iza, "a brilliant doctor" in Budapest, is cosmopolitan, gifted and — to Ettie's chagrin — divorced. But so, too, is she "a properly grateful child": A dutiful if somewhat distant daughter, Iza does what she thinks is best for Ettie, bringing her to live with her in the city. Both women believe that their lives will be easier if they live in close proximity. Sadly, the reality is far from so simple. Bereft, lonely and purposeless in the urban environment, Ettie asks, "What am I to do the whole day?" Finding a satisfactory answer proves heartbreakingly difficult.
Szabo deftly explores not only the complications of life under communism in the mid-20th century, but also the idiosyncratic and individual failures of empathy that infiltrate human life no matter the time or place. She exposes how, in spite of ourselves, we often espouse and admire the noblest ideals even as we hurt and neglect the people who should be closest to us.
In Hungary, the novel was published as "Pilatus," as in Pontius Pilate, who washed his hands of Jesus Christ in the same way that Iza — heroic as she is in many regards — seems to wash her hands of her aging mother to whom she cannot relate and with whom she struggles to know what to do.
But it is a testament to Szabo's skill that both women come across as complex and sympathetic. When Ettie thinks, "Iza didn't believe in anything that old people believed in," the reader feels equally the regret of Ettie and the reasonability of Iza, at odds though they are.
Hermann Hesse, one of Szabo's mentors, once said of her, "With Frau Szabo, you have caught a golden fish. Buy all of her novels, the ones she is writing and the ones she will write." With "Iza's Ballad" available in English, readers here in the States have — and should not miss — an additional chance to bask in Szabo's gold.
Kathleen Rooney is a freelance writer whose second novel, "Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk," will be published in January.
'Iza's Ballad'
By Magda Szabo, New York Review of Books Classics, 352 pages, $16.95