Magda Szabò
La Porta

My acquaintance with this book is due—I admit—to purely aesthetic curiosity driven by the cover. It was thanks to this reckless and impulsive choice that I was able to read a precious and special novel.

The story is very simple, summarizable in a few moves; a writer dealing with her first successes and an old lady, Emerec, who acts as her maid. Around them, a Hungarian town captured in the first post-war period, small-town characters, the neighbor, the doctor, the doorman, the policeman. Magda Szabó describes the relationship that binds the two women for over twenty years, the secrets each hides from the other, the mutual acquaintance that gradually becomes dependency, the impossibility of communication. Writer and maid symbolize opposite and different lives in which the faith of one clashes with the other's rejection of the divine, political passion with distrust and suspicion towards "all those sheets of paper," intellectual work with frantic and incessant physical activity. And despite this portrayal, Emerec unconsciously leads a life marked by Christian pietas because she has compassion for an entire class of defeated and marginalized people, from the destitute to the abandoned, to criminals, whom she neither recognizes by military uniform nor the nation for which they fight. Her aversion to power, declined in all forms, is global and without deterrents. She exercises love in such a profound way that it becomes almost violent, she loves the writer through actions sometimes contradictory to which a rigid and iron logic subjugates. The main occupation of her life is given by work and toil. Emerec does not rest; when she is not busy governing the author's house, she is seen "flitting" through the city carrying trays full of food, shoveling the ship along the village road, or washing clothes in boiling tubs. And it is she who dictates the rhythm and quality of the relationship with the author, made of quarrels and reconciliations, of stifled grudges and maternal affection. A door separates these feelings, just as it separates the worlds of the two women, occasionally allowing a glimpse inside to see glimpses of the old woman's past; tales of war, lost children, murdered loves, the destruction brought by Nazism, the escapes. And when this door, behind which Emerec jealously hides, is forced open by the worried writer due to the old woman's health conditions, the delicate balance between the two breaks, the maid's world, hitherto respected and praised by the community, is exposed to everyone's eyes, and her previously impeccable conduct is instantly devoted to dissolution.

In the book, one can distinctly feel the influence of Russian novels, particularly Dostoevsky; a heavy sense of guilt and remorse is the engine that drives the author, having achieved success, to look back, mentally retrace the days of that relationship. To Hermann Hesse goes the credit of having brought the Hungarian writer to the West and his foresight in recommending "read all the books by Magda Szabó, those written and the ones yet to be written."