Customer Reviews

The Door

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At a first glance the novel seems to be simple: the book is about the relationship between two women: an author and her housekeeper. However, if you stuck strictly to this statement, you'd be oversimplifying the book and what it is about. As you go through the pages events of the past in flashes come to the surface, making the end shocking and dramatic.

Magda Szabo is one of the most charismatic writers of our time: her books are highly popular in Hungary and abroad. Her books have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Her charisma can be strongly felt in her novels as well. Reading her books is like putting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together: at the end all pieces come to their place and the reader is left breathless with the dramatic and cruel fate the characters are/were bound to face. It is fate looming over people, unavoidable in Szabo's books, arising from the circumstances and personality of the characters.

This is a story that could be the story of anyone's forgotten grandmother. And much more besides. Set in Budapest, Magda Szabo's writer-narrator tells us, in a style that literally pours itself out on the page and won't let go of the reader, of her relationship with the little lady downstairs, the old concierge who started out as her housekeeper and ended up ruling her life. It is a bewildering tale of love-hate relationships, set against a vague backcloth of communist Hungary and the aftermath of world war II; it is also an analysis of guilt and an apology for tolerance of people's varied beliefs, and the final scenes make one wonder if the narrator isn't apologising for her country and not only herself.

For once also, here is a novel which accords an important place to the role of animals in our lives. Viola, the dog, has an important part to play, and the detailed and profound observation of animal behaviour is perhaps one of the most remarkable aspects of the book.

Who would have thought that a story about an old woman who dies would be interesting? Old women die all the time. And I certainly never would have believed that the life of an orderly writer in front of her typewriter would hold anyone's attention ... especially mine. But I was flipping the pages of this novel faster than I would any Kootz book and crying over the tragedies of this character as much as any of Charlotte Bronte's.

There may be nothing new under the sun, including plots and characters, but good writing can make something old something powerful--and excellent fiction opens our eyes so we see reality truthfully.

The Door by Magda Szabo is a detailed, intimate account of a relationship between two women. Paradoxically, it was the distance between them that generated the intimacy. Presented with behaviour and attitudes she could not identify with or recognise, a young writer tries to analyse her maid's motives, to rationalise her strangeness, to explain her unconventional behaviour.

It is clear from the start that the new maid, Emerence, has had a fundamentally different kind of life from her employer. And, as the relationship develops, details of that life are slowly unearthed to be shared. Memories and reflections unfold like a gently opening flower, each miniscule change adding to what has gone before. Eventually these individually small incremental revelations complete a picture of a life that even the imagination of a writer could not have created.

The Door is rarely a vivid book. Its tone and style are always measured. Details are picked apart and analysed, their consequences examined under a microscope that seeks out motive, honesty and guilt. Paradoxically - perhaps as a consequence of this concentration on the psychological - there is no greats sense of place or setting. In fact, so deeply do the characters enter into the psychological aspects of their lives that they sometimes appear to have their gaze directed inwards on themselves. And eventually, an enduring reaction to the book is its constant consciousness of the distance between people, despite both intimacy and proximity.

The book's style is quite dense. There is very little dialogue, and what is offered is often stunted and awkward. Magda Szabo employs longs long paragraphs, whose content often meanders through different strands of the character's emotions. It is not a stream of consciousness form, however, and always avoids the poetic, never obfuscates, does not try to cloud issues to create a false sense of significance. In some ways, this is a criticism of the book, since the overall effect tends to be somewhat one-paced, with the different characters' perspectives inconclusively delineated.

Magda Szabo's book is still a rewarding read, especially if taken slowly, when the nuances of character and their relationships can be savoured. There are grand events between its covers, but they remain mainly domestic. It's the detail that counts.

One of the most poignant and beautifully written books I've read in a long time. I cannot begin to explain how much I love Emerence.