The Door

by Magda Szabó

The proportion of books published in the English-speaking world that are translations, from all languages (and including best-selling crime novels), is currently about three percent.

This statistic (from the introduction to the novel) really surprised me

It was a while before I realised there was no point in waiting for Emerence. She was like Jehovah: she punished for generations.

Writing isn’t an easy taskmaster. Sentences left unfinished never continue as well as they had begun. New ideas bend the main arch of the text, and it never again sits perfectly true.

She hadn’t even informed on the barber, though he had cheated her, robbed her of everything. Even his dreams were lies.

Emerence made it a condition that if you loved her, she should be the leading figure in your life. Of all those around her whom she considered really important, only the dog took that as natural and accepted it — even as he bit her.