The Hungarian Despair of Magda Szabo

On a recent cold, rainy Friday afternoon, I met my friend, whom I’ll call Nell—a small, compact, unflappable person with a halo of gold hair who ran away to join the circus when she was young. Nell was reading a book. When she raised her eyes from the page, she looked like someone who had stepped back from the curb at the very last moment before being hit by a bus. The book she was reading was a paperback novel with a pale gray cover, by the Hungarian writer Magda Szabó, called “The Door.” It was first published in Hungary, in 1987, then here in 1995, and was reissued last year, in a new translation by Len Rix. A few weeks ago, in The New York Review of Books, Deborah Eisenberg referred to the “white-knuckled experience” of reading it. Writing about “The Door,” in the Times, the writer Claire Messud, who, like Eisenberg, found the book mesmerizing, went so far as to say, “It has altered the way I understand my own life.”