Szabó, Magda

One of The New York Times Book Review's "10 Best Books of 2015" An NYRB Classics Original The Door is an unsettling exploration of the relationship between two very different women. Magda is a writer, educated, married to an academic, public-spirited, with an on-again-off-again relationship to Hungary's Communist authorities. Emerence is a peasant, illiterate, impassive, abrupt, seemingly ageless. She lives alone in a house that no one else may enter, not even her closest relatives. She is Magda's housekeeper and she has taken control over Magda's household, becoming indispensable to her. And Emerence, in her way, has come to depend on Magda. They share a kind of love--at least until Magda's long-sought success as a writer leads to a devastating revelation. Len Rix's prizewinning translation of The Door at last makes it possible for American readers to appreciate the masterwork of a major modern European writer.

The door

Helen 

Emerence's face resembled nothing so much as a calm, unruffled, early- morning mirror of water. 

It's a pity I don't know what an ambassador does. The only thing I want is the crypt. Just leave me in peace, and don't try to educate me. I know quite enough already. I wish I knew less. 

As I listened I felt a dull numbness, like the effect of chloroform, rather than the primal, anarchic agony you usually feel when you encounter someone you have loved now turned to dust, in some object like a little bowl, and you are required to believe that it is still the same person who once smiled at you.

sarah

For there was nothing offhand or casual in the way Emerence loved me. It was as if she'd learned it from the Bible, which she'd never held in her hands, or had drawn closer to the Apostles during her three years of schooling. Emerence didn't know the words of St Paul, but she lived them.

Writing isn’t an easy taskmaster. Sentences left unfinished never continue as well as they had begun. New ideas bend the main arch of the text, and it never again sits perfectly true.

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, and everything flowed from that. 

The door quotes

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