From the Bookshelf of The Read Around The World Book Club…

Iza's Ballad

Magda Szabó,

George Szirtes (Translator)

Start date: November 1, 2018

Finish date: November 30, 2018

Discussion: NOVEMBER 2018 - HUNGARY

Find A Copy At

Group Discussions About This Book

Showing 2 of 2 topics — 25 comments total

NOVEMBER 2018 - HUNGARY

Part 3&4
By Melanie · 12 posts · 22 views

last updated Nov 30, 2018 08:20PM

Part 1 & 2
By Melanie · 13 posts · 32 views

last updated Nov 28, 2018 07:22PM

What Members Thought

Nov 14, 2018 Marie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: around-the-world, favorites, library-books, ratw-book-club

Right from the start of this book you can tell you’re in the hands of a master. It’s overwhelmingly sad, but if you can handle that, there’s *so much* emotional complexity and exploration of all sorts of themes - relationships between women, grief, aging, social mobility. Really excellent. I will be ordering Szabo’s other books.

10 likes · Like · see review

Nov 24, 2018 Stacey rated it really liked it · review of another edition

4.25-4.5

While this quote doesn't embody the feeling of the novel, it does exhibit this particular characters outlook on life, and I found it beautiful, " ... winter seemed to him a drawing in chalk, spring a watercolour, summer an oil painting and autumn an etching or a linocut. "

Iza's Ballad has an underlying melancholy, but Szabo deftly interweaves life's disappoints and sadness' with light, happiness and hope. She has a light touch, a quiet power to effect emotion. She reminds us that life i ...more

7 likes · Like · see review

Dec 15, 2018 Jo rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This is a wonderfully written book that creates powerful pictures of its main characters, Ettie, Antal and Iza who all live in Hungary in the 1960’s. From the title I assumed it would be Iza’s voice we would hear most of but instead, much of the novel is seen from the perspective of Ettie, Iza’s mother, a woman who has just lost her husband and is grateful to find that her daughter wants her to move to Budapest with her so she won’t be living alone.

Ettie is a wonderfully drawn character who is This is a wonderfully written book that creates powerful pictures of its main characters, Ettie, Antal and Iza who all live in Hungary in the 1960’s. From the title I assumed it would be Iza’s voice we would hear most of but instead, much of the novel is seen from the perspective of Ettie, Iza’s mother, a woman who has just lost her husband and is grateful to find that her daughter wants her to move to Budapest with her so she won’t be living alone.

Ettie is a wonderfully drawn character who is firmly stuck in her ways, who deeply loved her husband and very much loves her child even if she is often bemused by her. She often thinks back to when she and Vince were young and first met, when Iza was a child and when Iza and her ex-husband Antal lived with them. She seems a capable and reasonably independent woman if now a little frail but when she moves to live with Iza in Budapest, this changes. Iza appears to smother her with love and value her presence while controlling every aspect of her life, how her room is decorated, what she eats, who she associates with and yet avoids spending time with her.

When the narrative shifts to Antal, another wonderful narrator, at first we hear about his poverty stricken childhood filled with tragedy and then beneficence and then progress to when he met and married Iza and what she was like as a young girl. Why their marriage failed and why he is concerned for Ettie are subtly revealed as the novel moves forward.

Iza does get to narrate parts of the book and puts forward her own thoughts and opinions about why and how she has behaved to those she loved but by the end of the book, we never really feel we know her as we do Ettie and Antal.There are various other characters who add to the charm of the novel, the neighbor Gica, Lidia the nurse and Iza’s boyfriend Domokos and they give insight into the other three characters but this is very much a novel about family, who are considered family and how family are valued. This is a novel that grabs your heart from the start without being melodramatic, instead it is a slow, quiet novel that makes asides to history and politics but is very much simply a novel of three captivating voices and it is just a wonderful read.

Some favorite lines
‘The constantly changing colour of the cinders lent the room a peculiar life; when the fire was lit she didn’t feel like she was alone, not even when the house as empty.’

‘All reminders of an earlier poverty that witnessed to her craft and skill, her inexhaustible invention in so lightly and imaginatively fending off the peril of the times, had vanished.’

‘The poor woman believes that old people’s pasts are the enemy. She has failed to notice how those pasts are explanations and values, the key to the present.
...more

4 likes · Like · see review