Book Specs 📖

One Sentence Synopsis🔖

Sassy, independent housekeeper and female writer develop a subversive relationship which comes crashing down after a dirty little secret is pried wide open.

Notes/Thoughts📝

• Finally!!!!! This one has been on the TBR for awhile now, both in my mind and on my shelf (Since April!). This is the second book I’ve read this year about a post-WWII fictional story set in Hungary (third one I read this year that is in Hungary!) that centers around a complex relationship between the help and the more privileged employers (mainly the female writer). This book is unique because it takes social expectations of hierarchical roles/characters like a housemaid and the employer and flips everything upside down. What good is intellectualism and writing when we don’t know how to be good humans first?
• On Emerence:
  • Shame – The stench and wreak of filth behind the door was a powerful analogy to compare the secrets that we are all afraid to admit to ourselves and show to people. Shame feels like what’s on the other side of the door: it’s dark and putrid, everyone looks away out of pity…or mercy?
  • Independence and competence – the impossible standards of being the one that everyone else counts on. There is a need to feel useful to be included. The unhealthy one-sided relationship essentially leads to the cause of Emerence’s death.
• Emerence is really the shit. I hope I’m less crabby when I’m old but just as outspoken and can call people on their crap when they’re being terrible. I loved that the author gave Emerence her own love story despite her difficult upbringing.

“Quotes”🗣

“I know now, what I didn’t then, that affection can’t always be expressed in calm, orderly, articulate ways, and that one cannot prescribe the form it should take for anyone else.”

“She was lonely. Who isn’t lonely, I’d like to know? And that includes people who do have someone but just haven’t noticed.”

“When I saw that she was beyond help, I had to give her the courage to have the last word herself, rather than someone else, or the ever-increasing misery, the pain in her spine, and the constant humiliation.”

“Art…If that’s what you were—artists—then everything would be real, even the dance, because you would know how to make the leaves move to your words, not to a wind machine or whatever it was.”

“Because I loved her, I could become so furious with her that sometimes I was shocked by my own response.”

“You don’t die that easily, but let me tell you, you come close to it. Afterwards, what you went through makes you so clever you wish you could become stupid again, utterly stupid.

“You can’t give anyone a greater gift than to spare them suffering.”

“Only people truly close to me can cause me real pain.”

“…creativity requires a state of grace. So many things are required for it to succeed—stimulus and composure, inner peace and a kind of bitter-sweet excitement…“