From the author of The Door and Abigail and for fans of Elena
Ferrante and Clarice Lispector, a newly translated novel about a theater
star who is forced to reckon with her painful and tragic past.
In The Door, in Iza's Ballad, and in Abigail, Magda Szabó
describes the complex relationships between women of different ages and
backgrounds with an astute and unsparing eye. Eszter, the narrator and
protagonist of The Fawn, may well be Szabó's most fascinating
creation.
Eszter, an only child, her father an eccentric aristocrat and steeply
downwardly mobile flower breeder, her mother a harried music teacher
failing to make ends meet, grows up poor and painfully aware of it in a
provincial Hungarian town.
This is before World War II, and Eszter, as she tells her story of
childhood loneliness and hunger, has forgotten no slight and forgiven
nobody, least of all her beautiful classmate Angela, whose unforced
kindness to her left the deepest wound.
And yet Eszter, post-war--which is when she has come to remember all
these things--is a star of the stage, now settled in Budapest, where
Angela, a devout Communist married to an esteemed scholar and translator
of Shakespeare, also lives.
The Fawn unfolds as Eszter's confession, filled with the rage of a
lifetime and born, we come to sense, of irreversible regret. It is a
tale of childhood, of the theater, of the collateral damage of the riven
twentieth century, of hatred, and, in the end, a tragic tale of love.
