Since the beginning of December, The Door by Magda Szabo has been one of the 10 Best Books of 2015 by The New York Times. Previously, Claire Messud had wrote a delighted review on Szabo’s masterpiece, so we had a chat with the American writer about the novel, Szabo and the NYT’s prestigious list.
Claire Messud/Facebook
Let's start with your feelings about the novel. What did you feel reading The Door?
I felt very drawn to the narrator -- who, I believe in this case is quite close to the author herself -- for her frankness, not only about Emerence's character about her own, her vanities and failings as well as her strengths. The novel is both simple and fable-like, and quite complicated. It operates on many levels. It's powerfully moving. There are so many remarkable scenes; and each of the characters is distinct and particular. Emerence is an extraordinary figure. And Viola is one of my favorites. She is a rare and amazing dog, one of the great literary dogs of all time.
The Hungarian culture, literature included, is very isolated. So how much a 20th century novel from Central-Eastern Europe can be understandable to today's Americans?
I don't actually know Hungarian culture, except through literature; and so I can't tell you how accurately the novel enables us to see it. Moreover, I'm not sure I'm a very representative American. But I think the strength of the novel comes from its honesty about human nature and human behavior. An American version of Emerence might look rather different, but the dignity that she maintains, her insistence on her privacy, her strength, her obstinacy, her loyalty would be very similar. These are traits that any reader can recognize. In Emerence's case, there's an almost mythic recounting of her youth; and then there are the tragedies of the war that she holds close to her heart and doesn't share openly. These are of course particular to her experience and her culture and the period of her life, in the mid and late 20th century; but they're also timeless. That's what makes the novel so great.
You wrote in your review that Szabo's words „haunted" you. Could you tell me more about this experience?
Several years ago, my aunt died. She was my father's only sister, a devout Catholic and very French, for whom the fact that her nieces were raised Anglophone and Protestant was a grave disappointment. After my father died, she went into a precipitous decline; and my sister and I sought to help her get better, because we believed that there was much for her still to live for. But what was intended by us as a gesture of love was seen by her as a failure to understand and respect her point of view. She wanted to die, at that point, and saw our efforts as meddling, as a failure of love. She became bitter, even angry. I didn't understand it well at the time, and was terribly hurt; but when I read Szabo's novel, and understood how, at various moments, Magda had profoundly misunderstood Emerence and her desires, I recognized in their relationship my own with my aunt. Suddenly my aunt's anger made sense to me.
You also mentioned that the English language world almost missed such a gem. How much do you think the English-language writers are overrepresented in today's literature?
It's an important discussion, always, and an ongoing effort by various publishers and organizations to try to make Anglophone readers more aware of literature written in languages other than English. In the United States, the percentage of published literature in translation is very small -- I think it's three percent. In the UK, I believe the numbers are a bit better. In other countries, there's much more work translated, from all languages as well as English. I don't know the statistics, but I imagine the predominance of English-language literature in translation has also grown -- on account of the internet, English is the lingua franca in a way that wasn't so profoundly true even 20 years ago. So many people speak and read English. The hope has to be that over time, globalization will enable a freer and fuller transmission of diverse cultures, and not just some dismaying English language hegemony.
Could you name an equivalent or a similar writer to Magda Szabo from the English-language literature?
As I'm not sure that I fully understand the important role Magda Szabo plays in Hungarian literature, I'm not sure I can really answer this question properly. But one writer who comes to mind is Alice Munro, the Canadian short story writer, whose stories, as intricate as novels, are often dark, always complex and subtle, and unflinchingly honest about what it's like to be human. She's a writer whose work is very rooted in her native Canada, but it transcends its time and place, often fable-like.
And last but not least, in Europe, we frequently hear conversations about women literature vs (real) literature. Do you think that masterpieces written by women, like The Door, could contradict with such prejudice, or even conquer it?
The world is always evolving, thank goodness. Prejudices and misconceptions that held sway even when I was young, in the 1980s, are now dissipating. There's still a long way to go. But it's meaningful that the editors of the New York Times Book Review (where the editor in chief, Pamela Paul, is a woman) chose The Door -- a book by a woman, a book by a Hungarian, a book originally published 30 years ago -- as one of their books of the year. Literary quality and gender are unrelated: more people understand this as time goes by. Eventually, I trust, we won't need to point it out any longer, as it will simply be a given.
