The Door Paperback - 2015

Media reviews

“Szabó’s style (the text is brilliantly translated), laced with gentle humor, is as mesmerizing as are her characters. Her dexterous, self-ironizing distance (the autobiographical elements are obvious), the detached gestures with which the narrator interrupts herself, the muted fury that erupts in overlong or half-sentences, and a certain moral seriousness and ethical anguish also impregnate this gem of a novel. Ultimately, the text is a tranquil memento, a piece of irrefutable poetry, a bizarre counterpart to our universal betrayal—out of love.” —World Literature Today
 
“The Door is a valuable document of a vital relationship.” —The Guardian
 
“A superbly controlled and involving work of art...Szabó is keen to engage with the national past, ‘the years people don’t talk about very much’: the White Terror and the Red; the Second World War; the forsaking of the Hungarian Jews; the calamity of 1956. But she does this while retaining the perspective, the human scale, of her characters...The novel’s unity is not that of an incident of an age, but of a relationship—a relationship rendered with generous sympathy and in all its vital contradiction.” —London Review of Books
 
“The Door tells a great deal about the sufferings of 20th-century Hungary through the heart and mind of a single fearless woman, as Magda is taught by example to consider her own inadequacies. Magda Szabó’s great book was published in Hungary as long ago as 1987; Len Rix’s fluent translation is a belated and welcome gift to readers in English...profoundly moving.” —The Independent
 
“Clever, moving, frightening, it deserves to be a bestseller.” —The Telegraph
 
“The Door is a marvellous book dominated by female characters.” —The Times (London)
 
“No brief summary can do justice to the intelligence and moral complexity of this novel. I picked it up without expectation. I read it with gathering intensity, and a swelling admiration. I finished it, and straightaway started to read it again. It is unusual, original, and utterly compelling.” —The Scotsman
 
“This melting pot of a novel hangs from a solid tripod of Greek myth, Biblical scripture and Slavic fairy tale, handled with style and an easy familiarity. There is a great deal here to move anyone who has watched or felt the sufferings of age.” —Glasgow Herald 

Citations

• Kirkus Reviews, 01/01/0001, Page 0
• New York Times Book Review, 12/13/2015, Page 12
• NY Times Notable Bks of Year, 12/06/2015, Page 26
• Publishers Weekly, 11/24/2014, Page 0