The Door by Magda Szabo

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.

REVIEWS

"'The Door' is a deeply strange and equally affecting book, a dark domestic fairy tale about the relationship between a Hungarian writer, Magda, and her taciturn elderly housekeeper, Emerence.” —John Williams, The New York Times

"'The Door,' by Magda Szabo, is a Hungarian novel with the elemental force of a myth—the story of a middle-class writer and the servant who takes over her household and her life. Class dynamics, female friendship, the power of will—Szabo writes about them all with eerie fascination." —Adam Kirsch, The New York Times Book Review

"Szabó is a master tension builder, and Emerence's demise . . . is heartbreakingly rendered." —Publishers Weekly

PRODUCT DETAILS
Trade Paperback
Publisher: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 978-1590177716
Pages: 288