Magda Szabó

Emerence is a domestic servant – strong, fierce, eccentric, and with a reputation for being a first-rate housekeeper. When Magda, a young Hungarian writer, takes her on she never imagines how important this woman will become to her. It takes twenty years for a complex trust between them to be slowly, carefully built. But Emerence has secrets and vulnerabilities beneath her indomitable exterior which will test Magda’s friendship and change the complexion of both their lives irreversibly. Elegant, pocket-sized paperbacks, VINTAGE Editions celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found.

The Door

aywen

You pay back everybody who upsets you, even me. If only you’d shout and scream — but all you do is smile. You’re the most vengeful person I ever met. You sleep with a knife under your pillow, and you wait till the time comes to stick it in. If it’s something really bad you don’t just scratch — you kill.

She didn’t understand that it was because of our mutual love that she went on stabbing me till I fell to my knees, that she did it because I loved her, and she loved me. Only people truly close to me can cause me real pain. She might have grasped that long ago, but she understood only what she wanted to.

maia

Once after she'd been introduced to the tape recorder in apartment and told that you could play back a text or a piece of music, she talked about what it would be like if someone's life were recorded and put on tape, to be rewound, stopped and replaced at will. She said she'd accept her own life the way it was; or rather, as it would be up to her death, but with the proviso that she might rewind it to any point she chose. I didn't dare ask where she would stop the machine, and still less, why there. I didn't think she'd tell me anyway.

The Door quotes

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