Szabo is conscientious about laying bare the irony of accepting an award from the very people who destroyed her career. The Door starts in 1958, the year Szabo published her first book and the year before Magdushka wins a great prize-no coincidence in this story that closely mirrors Szabo’s life. The Party, says The Door’s translator Len Rix in Szabo’s obituary, let her career resume in 1958 and, in an ironic turn, promptly awarded her the József Attila, one of Hungary’s top literary prizes, in 1959. They stripped her of the prize, banned her books, and kept her from publishing for the next decade, during which time she became a teacher and turned to fiction. But the Communists labeled her a class enemy for her bourgeois background. She started as a poet, winning Hungary’s Baumgarten Prize in 1949 for two volumes of verse. And Emerence is the Greek god of housekeepers: “She had the strength of a mythological hero.”Ī well-respected and prolific writer, Szabo churned out fifteen novels and five plays, along with stories, essays, criticism, and verse. Emerence makes it clear to Magdushka and her husband that only if she finds them agreeable will she be their housekeeper. But when Emerence shows up for the interview in an evening dress, we know it won’t be an ordinary domestic partnership. Eager to kick-start her career, she wants to hire someone to take care of her fancy new apartment to free up time to write. When the novel begins, in 1958, the Communists have released their stranglehold on Magdushka, who (like Szabo) has been barred from publishing for ten years. She constructs the narrative around a deeply authentic friendship while leaving unresolved the main idea: How will you conduct yourself in your quest to be an authentic writer, and what are the costs to the people who care for you? It’s a political novel grounded in the story of a friendship between Magdushka, a writer-intellectual and member of the ruling class, and Emerence, a peasant woman with moxie, who provides a strong counterpoint to Magdushka’s emotional timidity. Published in 1987 in Hungary, The Door documents two decades of life in Budapest, a decade after the Communist takeover in 1948. “The fact that I was trying to save her rather than destroy her changes nothing.” “I killed Emerence,” says the narrator on page three.

The truth leaps from the pages of Magda Szabo’s vivifying and claustrophobic novel The Door as the book fulfills your worst nightmare.

And what happens when a woman writer friend becomes successful? And if those friendships are already complicated, what are the costs of being friends with a woman writer? Because writers give and give to their writing, they gorge on everything around them to feed their stories. Friendships between women are fraught with competition and petty jealousies, tarnished by slights and hidden resentments, and dislocated when class distinctions kick in.

The door by magda szabó