Magda Szabo (1917 – 2007), one of Hungary’s most celebrated authors, lays bare her own values and her soul in The Door, a rich and intensely intimate examination of the relationship between a character named Magdushka, a writer whose point of view controls this novel, and Emerence, her housekeeper-servant. As suggested by the choice of the main character’s name and occupation, much of the story here parallels aspects obvious from the author’s own biography, and she has admitted in an interview that much of the content here is based on similar experiences from her own life. How much is actually true and how much is an elaboration becomes irrelevant once the book gets underway, though it is difficult to imagine the author recreating Magdushka’s unwavering commitment to the temperamental and prideful Emerence, her affecting sense of responsibility, and her overwhelming guilt regarding her betrayal of a secret, if she herself had never experienced similar feelings under very similar conditions. In a brief opening chapter, Magdushka, now in old age, describes the continuing nightmare which has loomed over her adult life. In it she is behind the front door of her own house, unable to open it for rescuers and unable to call for help. Magdushka sees parallels between this nightmare and her experiences with Emerence at the climax of their relationship many years earlier. Since what happened then is now in the past, she knows that “none of that matters, because what happened is beyond remedy.”
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On his way to Dorinish, the tiny Irish island which he bought ten years before, John Lennon, now thirty-seven, is in the midst of a personal crisis. It is 1978, and the Beatles have not been together for eight years. Lennon has watched his first marriage crumble and his son Julian disappear from his life. Married in 1969 to Yoko Ono, he separated from her for eighteen months, shortly after their marriage. Later reunited, they had a baby, Sean, with whom he now spends most of his time at home in New York, but he is otherwise at loose ends. He has not written any music since 1975, and he feels as if he has lost his way, both musically and personally. Famous, at this point, for his counterculture points of view, he has actively courted attention to publicize his anti-government agenda, and has become involved with drugs, Marxism, the Black Panthers, and behavior which has put him under the surveillance of the FBI, though he has otherwise tried to avoid publicity in his personal life. He now feels that if he can get away and spend time alone for only three days on Dorinish, that he might come to some new conclusions about his life and how to live it.
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With an opening story which feels like some bizarre, twisted, and darkly humorous version of Deliverance, O. Henry Award-winner Arthur Bradford turns not just this plot on its head but every other plot in every other story in this collection. These interconnected stories feature a young, naïve speaker, usually identified as “Georgie,” who seems born without a sense of caution, someone who appears to have no ability to predict disasters as he enthusiastically follows his imagination or heart without a glance backward – or forward. Few readers will be able to resist this character, whose heart is in the right place though he lives on a completely different plane from the rest of the world. Even those few main characters who are not specifically identified as “Georgie” might just as well be Georgie in terms of their personality and behavior, acting the way many of us dreamed of behaving in an earlier, simpler world, long before we grew up and learned to “pay attention,” “think of the future,” and “be careful.” It is the tension between our empathy for Georgie and our frustration with him for his gullibility that keeps the reader entertained and involved, though Georgie is guaranteed to make every parent who reads this book cringe.
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In this dramatic and illuminating fictionalized biography of author Thomas Hardy (1840 – 1928), Christopher Nicholson recreates a period in which Hardy experiences his highest personal excitements and his most bitter disappointments. At age eighty-four, Hardy is regarded as the wealthiest writer in England, but he is unable to focus on a new book and seems able to write only poems, most of which leave him unsatisfied. Living in Dorset in a house that he himself designed in England’s rural south, where he grew up, Hardy has remained in touch with the characters who people his novels, rural people living close to the land, far from hidebound London with its frustrating elitism. An iconoclast whose novels were often shocking to his readers, Hardy depicted ideas and values that were in sharp contrast with those of the Victorian period – including issues of sex, marriage, and religious doubt, which, not surprisingly, reflected some of his own conflicts. Now in the winter of his life, Hardy wants to grasp a kind of happiness that has so far eluded him.
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Florian Heumann, the young narrator of this intense and moving study of families and their memories, has just arrived with his family from Hamburg, where he lives, to visit his mother’s ancestral home in southern Italy for a family vacation. His grandfather, Giorgio Bellusci, is absent, but no one will tell him where his grandfather is. All we learn is that his grandfather has been a friend of Hans Heumann, Florian’s other grandfather. Gradually, through flashbacks, the family history unfolds, following numerous generations, all memorably depicted, and their lives in Roccalba, a town in the “toe of Italy” located between the Tyrrhenian and Ionian Seas. Just as the Calabrian peninsula separates the two seas, it also separates the life forces which drive the novel–the sense of romanticism vs. hard-nosed reality, the generosity and love for others vs. long-time vendettas, and the drive to fulfill one’s dreams vs. the loss of one’s dreams due to outside forces. Abate, a great story-teller, creates lively atmospheres and family dynamics. His characters are sensitively developed, and as the narrative flips back and forth in time, the reader becomes involved in an intense family saga concisely rendered in only two hundred pages.
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