I Read Magda Szabó’s ‘The Door’.

I’m pretty sure I got the recommendation about this book from one of my favorite Creators walking the earth right now. She posted it on her Instagram stories which is why I think I can’t revisit the post to see what she was quoted as saying about it. Suffice to say, when someone has the capacity to Make Things, to consistently spool things from their mind and Manifest Something From Nothingness, there is an alchemy at play that requires not only a touch of their own brain and soul’s magic, but also a collection of semantic ingredients that are used to build the golems of their fiction. In other words, when Brit Marling speaks, I listen.

I’ve met people in my life who tend to understand my energy, who seem to vibe with me in a way that really syncs up in a way that generates not only a forward momentum for myself in the space of that bracketed timeline, but also gives me hope for some outer future, that what I’m doing is The Right Work, is a voice that can still be heard despite all the noise. A couple that I’ve met at work was kind enough to present me with a little money around Christmas, and since our conversations surrounded books (and all media), I decided to deliberately use the gift to put some more books into the stack. One of those books in that bookstore trip is this: The Door by Magda Sazbó.

This is one of the most intense books that I’ve ever read, and it isn’t because of the action involved or the thrilling suspense. This is a book about relationships. In fact, more succinctly about a relationship between two people that begins as one employer and one employee, but blossoms in a way that feels more timeless and more human over time. By the end of the book, the love that is present between the two of them is both mutually impactful, but also in two separate languages that are reciprocals of one another. Their individual needs are not met by one another, but also the way that they express themselves in their interactions is metered and battered and marred by the others’ form of acceptance. It somehow works, either through attrition or through evolution, but whatever the case, there is a relationship there that cannot be touched and cannot be broken.

I use the word ‘relationship’ a lot in this little summary, but the interactions between the women is far from romantic. Emerence (what a name) is a caretaker in the home of the narrator, an author (who I think has the same name as the actual author, though I don’t believe it’s meant to be the same person) who spends her time at home working on her writing. Emerence is a country woman with absolutely bulletproof morals, a code of ethics and rigor that rivals the most steadfast philosophers and stoics. She believes in a round-the-clock work schedule, a keeper of promises that will drag her through her doom, and a judgment of character and belief so fast and so deeply honest that she will blast you with her testimony and retribution without reprieve in front of your own family, in front of your loved ones. She will do so loudly and in such detail that you will feel shriveled by the end of it, a skeleton of the corpse you once embodied. In many ways, she reminded me of Daniel Plainview, the steadfast and unbreakable businessman from There Will Be Blood, but without desire, without greed, without want. She was the way she was plainly. She was religious in her system, but religious without a God or a god or a choir. Her way of life was pristine, baptised by the daily austerity and inclemence of her labor. Anyone who chose not to go knee deep, to ruin their hands and knuckles with The Work was lazy. Every art was not authentic, as composition was an affront to existence, perspective was an insult to the big picture. Imagine the Western cold perspective of the Russian Bloc as a person. Nothing in. Nothing out. Then when our narrator least expects it, Emerence will depend on her as a shoulder to cry on. She will give some confession that starts as a rebuke, as reprehense, and it will spill over into biography, as some cold and awful thing that happened to her in her life. Emerence will have you believe that it was the anvil that shaped her, the hammer and the fire which yielded her demeanor, but what you will find through the 3–5 anecdotes that she shares (and the one from her distant family) is that she was broken down by a life of hardships, put back together through an unwavering constitution and a strength that has drowned out its compassion and continued to stagger forward despite overwhelming deluge of reason and excuse to give in and otherwise fall apart.

The narrator (who I believe is also named Magda? though I am unsure; sorry) is a woman who is just trying to live, to exist in a happy marriage and with a well-behaved dog (thanks to Emerence, the tacit owner of the canine) and a career. Her writing prowess is lauded with awards and prizes, with articles and a progressive sense that she is gaining a bigger and bigger following. Through her mind, we see how her intentions are sometimes genuine but also sometimes simply on the surface and through the interactions with her housekeeper, she learns a lot not only about herself and her perspectives but also about the world at large. Her small world expands with each experience writ larger and shared with a raw honesty.

Their engagement can sometimes border on violent. But the love that’s there between them swings with the same vast inertia contributed by the ever swinging pendulum. There is a sense a form of abuse forming, a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, but also a sense of the backwards reasoning of a ‘country person’, someone so embedded in their vision that their perspective has been strangled to the point of damage.

As the story climaxes, the heft of Emerence’s dedication to The Lady Writer reveals its complete form, something that challenges our core beliefs about what it means to be dedicated to someone, what it means to want to honor someone so completely that it cannot be formed into words. The complexity of this character’s emotions and intentions is harsh and jarring at times, but when the dust settles, we can get a complete vision of who this woman is and that her love language goes beyond what we comprehend as tangible.

I highly recommend this one as it really gave me a valuable perspective on how to show friendship, how to express one’s appreciation of one another, and how to understand the different natures of our statements to one another. This is a novel of volume, of rich depth that I would want to put in the hands of everyone who has long friendships that seem to have lived full lives. I think it also is one of those rare stories that does not seem to touch at all on romance or intelligible love, but instead doubles down on our human connection.