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
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 […]