The Fawn

April 1, 2023
An actress relates her own drama. Award-winning Hungarian writer Szab� (1917-2007) makes her country's turbulent history the backdrop for her second novel, published in 1959 and newly translated by Rix. During one fateful day in 1954, theater star Eszter Encsy, a woman consumed by hatred and bitterness, recounts the story of her life to someone whose identity is slowly revealed. She was shaped, she shows, by an impoverished childhood in prewar Hungary, the brutal war that broke out when she was 15, and the Soviet takeover in 1948, which turned Hungary into a puppet communist state. Her father was a lawyer, "refined, easy-going, exceptionally cultured," but prone to giving free advice and turning away potential clients. Instead, he happily devoted himself to horticulture. As the family devolved into poverty, they became, Eszter admits, "a public disgrace." Supporting the family fell to her mother, who offered piano lessons; and carrying out all the household chores fell to Eszter: "Mother had to take special care of her hands, so I did the shopping, I cooked the supper, I chopped the firewood and dealt with the laundry." She felt "utterly insignificant" to her parents, who were devoted only to each other; she had no friends. "Everyone hated me," she recalls, describing herself as "a bad classmate, sour, irritable and riddled with envy." Her jealousy was focused especially on her classmate Ang�la--beautiful, wealthy, and kind; her benevolence incited Eszter's rage. Eszter boasts that she lies "so easily I could have made a career out of it," which, as an actress, she actually did; but her confessions of cruelty and spite, of the betrayals and hypocrisy she witnessed, of the hurts she experienced, hardly seem lies but rather evidence of desperate need. Among the many tormented women who people Szab�'s other novels, Eszter stands as most deeply and irreparably wounded by a traumatic past. A bleak, shattering tale.

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March 6, 2023
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.