The Fawn

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.

Magda Szabó (1917–2007) is considered one of Hungary's greatest novelists. Her novels, dramas, essays, and poetry have been published in forty-two countries and in 2003 she was awarded the Prix Femina étranger for The Door. The NYRB Classics edition of The Door was selected as one of the The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2015. NYRB Classics also publishes Szabó's novels Iza's Ballad, Katalin Street, and Abigail.

Len Rix is a poet, critic, and former literature professor. In 2006, he was awarded the Oxford-Weidendfeld Translation Prize for his translation of Magda Szabó's The Door.