Hungarian Literature

 Another of Magda Szabo's novels came my way thanks to Pete T.:  Abigail (1970; New York Review of Books, 2020; translated by Len Rix). [The first book Szabo's predates the journal I am drawing on for these notes - another example of my past in your future.)] An enjoyable book, even if I detected "Abigail" early on - that did not lessen the book. See,I did not  think I would enjoy a novel about a girls school in Hungary during World War Two as much as I did. One sort of incarceration reflected upon another. Then I wondered is this what Hungary was like under Admiral Horthy and then the Germans: life rebelling against the darkness? The boarding school novel became a war novel and then a thriller as the Germans take captive the protagonist's father.

And about the protagonist: the comparison with Jane Austen's Emma seems both apt and jejune. The author illustrates a moral that humility  is the important virtue for a species capable of causing so much harm. Szabo's Gina faces a greater danger than Austen's Emma, so her errors might cause an equivalent greater harm.

And here is the important thing take away (IMHO, lol): 1) that we must see the humanity in people of different cultures and 2) that we recognize in those strangers examples of right conduct for human beings.

Read on.

sch

2/23/2020