Book Specs 📖

• Author: Magda Szabó
• Translator: Len Rix (translated from Hungarian)
• Genre: Literary Fiction / Psychological Fiction
• Publisher: NYRB
• Pages: 288

One Sentence Synopsis🔖

Highly independent housekeeper and female writer develop a subversive relationship which comes crashing down after the housekeeper’s dirty little secret in her personal life is pried open.

Notes/Thoughts📝

• Finally!!!!! This one has been on the TBR for awhile now (I’m surprised I did not write the date down but I will find you!!). This is the second book I’ve read this year about a post-WWII novel situated in Hungary that centers around a complex relationship between the help and the more privileged homeowners (The Safekeep). In both books there is this theme of human dignity and equality in relationships that surpasses the hierarchical roles we have set in society. The Door was a little different in the way that the housekeeper felt like the mother – the person that called the shots and was fiercely loyal adn honest, cpatured everyone’s hearts. Meanwhile the female writer
• Shame – The stench and wreakof filth behind the door

“Quotes”🗣

“…affection can’t always be expressed in calm, orderly, articulate ways, and that one cannot prsecribe the form it shold 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 misert, 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…