book review: Either/Or by Elif Batuman | BookBrowse.You can pick up a copy of The Door here on Book Depository. I’m happy to have read it and am eager to read more from Szabó – and from Len Rix, who did a great job with the translation – but I can’t decide if this is the sort of book I’ll want to revisit in a few years or whether I’m sufficiently unsettled as to appreciate it from afar without attempting a reread to reengage. Like Emerence herself, this book is entirely devoid of warmth in a way that started to feel draining this from someone who genuinely loves dark fiction. Emerence herself feels like a (very deliberately constructed) contradiction: she abhors organized religion but appears to be the embodiment of something almost divine – there’s also a question of her relationship to Hungary’s shifting cultural landscape that I think could benefit from a deep dive into the sociopolitical context of this historical period.īut though I found this book brilliant from start to finish, there was something I grew to dread about picking it up the closer I got to the end. While The Door reads almost like a twisted fable, it’s morally ambiguous to the extreme: both characters engage in destructive behavior and it’s difficult at times to discern who exactly you should be sympathizing with. A clash of values between the two provides the main conflict for this tense and elusive story: Ali Smith writes in her brief introduction, “Their relationship transforms into one full of the barbed hostilities of love.”Įmerence – cold, strong, and fiercely, irrationally independent – is an unforgettable character, though she doesn’t feel like a real person as much as a construct but a construct for what is the question.

The Door centers on the relationship between two very different women – the protagonist who is a writer, and her housekeeper, an older woman named Emerence. What a brilliant, infuriating, deeply perplexing book.

The Door by Magda Szabó