Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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She had no idea what life was, or death.

Katalin Street by Magda Szabo

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This book is by the Hungarian writer Magda Szabo. I read and reviewed her novel The Door last year and it was one of the best books I read that year and any year. This book is twenty or so years older than that and one is quite different because of this. She was about 50 when this book was published and 70 when The Door was, and so age certainly had some role in the differences, but not the only differences, or even the primary […]

She also demanded of me that, in my art, it should be real passion and not machinery that moved the branches. That was a major gift, the greatest of her bequests.

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This is a Hungarian novel from 1987, and in many ways it feels completely fresh and 30 years older than it actually is. That’s a good thing. The novel is about a novelist who in a time of specific need hires an older cleaning woman. This woman comes with a set of peculiarities, firstly that she demands some conditions on the employment such as choosing the rate and possibly withholding her own employment. The novelist soon finds that the tradeoffs between the work being done […]

A Fearsome Kind of Love

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The Door (1987), by Hungarian novelist Magda Szabo (1917-2007), is the story of a writer’s relationship with her older cleaning woman. The two women, a generation apart, develop an antagonistic or love/hate kind of friendship. Emerence, the cleaning woman, is a force to be reckoned with; she has strong views on politics and religion, and she is unafraid of authority. While she is known in the neighborhood for her hard work and generosity, she shows her employer, never named but referred to by neighbors as […]



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