I enjoyed all three Szabo novels released by NYRB: Abigail, Katalin Street and this, the strangest and most compelling of the three. The novel is the story of two women, Magda, an intellectual and writer living with her husband in a comfortable Budapest apartment, and Emerence, her cleaning lady. Emerence is possibly one of fiction's more mysterious characters. Of peasant stock, she is forbidding but loving, ferociously hard-working, apolitical and anti-intellectual and yet seemingly the ruler of the denizens of their Budapest neighborhood, regardless of their their social class. Magda comes quickly to depend on Emerence to keep her home running, while no one is ever allowed to cross the threshold of Emerence's home.
Operating on a number of levels, Magda and Emerence's dysfunctional, co-dependent relationship explores issues of class, education, culture, and politics in twentieth-century Hungary. Alien but affecting.
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