Book: Magda Szabó's Abigail

I have read Magda Szabó's Abigail. If my notes have not disappeared, you will get to read about it in the future. Meanwhile, Szabó's translator is interviewed here.

I read two of her novels and found her an excellent writer. She brought to life Hungary during WW Two. The translator makes a very good case for reading Szabó:

Hungary in particular is veiled from us by a tissue of uninformed prejudices: it is just another of those blighted foreign states that seem forever in the grip of some godawful totalitarianism of the right or the left. It is perhaps only serious novels, such as this one, that can counter those notions. The truth is that the Hungarian people then, for all their political misadventures, were and are not so very different from ourselves: they too have long been a centre of high European civilisation and have contributed much to our common culture. It is only by accidents of place and history that we in the West were spared the horrors they endured, and we need to know far more than we currently do about them, if only to understand our own lives and place in the world better.

Therein may also be the best reason to write.

sch

 12/29/21