The Fawn
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
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 is an only child. She grows up in a provincial Hungarian town with her father, an eccentric aristocrat and steeply downwardly mobile flower breeder, and her mother, a harried music teacher failing to make ends meet, in the years before World War II. In postwar Communist Hungary, Eszter has moved to Budapest and become a star of the stage, but she has forgotten no slight and forgiven nobody, least of all her too kind and beautiful classmate Angela.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A popular Hungarian actor reflects on a lifetime of complicated relationships in this beguiling 1959 novel from Szabó (1917–2007), known for such later work as The Door. In 1954, stage and screen star Eszter Encsy addresses an unidentified loved one, revealing that, contrary to her blue-blooded public persona, she grew up in poverty. She had to wear ill-fitting shoes that deformed her feet, her "mad lawyer" father was unable to work, and her mother, who came from a family of aristocrats, resorted to teaching piano lessons and left Eszter responsible for the housework. She also recalls the bombing of their house during WWII and her bitter feelings toward a classmate named Angéla, whose family led a more comfortable life and weathered Angéla's father's infidelity. (Even in adulthood, Eszter harbors hatred of the beautiful and wealthy Angéla.) What emerges is a fervent portrait of an often defensive actor who created a role for herself that she can't stop playing, even when she isn't on stage. Though the tone is a bit one-note, Szabó keeps this engaging via gradually parceled clues about who she's talking to and just why she's so vindictive toward Angéla. Fans of postwar European lit ought to check this out.
