For the next meeting of the book club, we chose the novel The Door by Magda Szabo. I thought it an excellent novel. The novel is clearly placed in space, taking place almost wholly in Budapest, but it is less clearly placed in time. I could not quite place the span of almost twenty years in which the action occurs.
Then I noticed at a critical point in the plot the statement that "Easter fell early that year, at the very beginning of April". Within the plausible range of years for that point, the two earliest dates of Easter were April 2, 1972, and April 3, 1983. For other reasons, 1983 seemed the most probable date. I was pleased to have decided this.
The pleasure lasted for about five minutes after I walked away from the computer. Who is to say that the assertion of an early Easter had anything to do with a specific year, and not with the weather imagined by the writer? W.B. Stanford, editor of a Macmillan edition of The Odyssey, had some dismissive remarks about scholars who claim to identify the islands visited along Odysseus's way, referring to them as "those who think they can map fairyland". Am I trying a similar enterprise?
I like that book. When reading it, I assumed '70s rather than '80s, although I'd have to go back to the text to give you any sensible reasons for that assumption. If you ever see another by her called Night of the Pig Killing, I've been looking for it for ages. I try very hard with Hungarian, but I'm not proficient enough to read the book in original yet (probably never will be, but one must hope)
ReplyDeleteMost of the book would have fallen in the 1970s, by my reckoning. But again, there are elements even of the relative chronology that seem vague. Emerence was born in 1905; her fiance was murdered during the Aster Revolution of 1918--were servant girls of thirteen commonly engaged to be married?
DeleteNYRB has published four of Szabo's novels since 2015: The Door, Iza's Ballad, Katalin Street, and just last month Abigail. So perhaps Night of Pig Killing will be next.