The Fawn (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781681377377)

From the author of The Door and Abigail and for fans of Elena Ferrante and Clarice Lispector, a newly translated novel about a theater star who is forced to reckon with her painful and tragic past.

In The Door, in Iza's Ballad, and in Abigail, Magda Szabó describes the complex relationships between women of different ages and backgrounds with an astute and unsparing eye. Eszter, the narrator and protagonist of The Fawn, may well be Szabó's most fascinating creation.

Eszter is an only child. She grows up in a provincial Hungarian town with her father, an eccentric aristocrat and steeply downwardly mobile flower breeder, and her mother, a harried music teacher failing to make ends meet, in the years before World War II. In postwar Communist Hungary, Eszter has moved to Budapest and become a star of the stage, but she has forgotten no slight and forgiven nobody, least of all her too kind and beautiful classmate Angela.

The Fawn unfolds as Eszter's confession, filled with the rage of a lifetime and born, we come to sense, of irreversible regret. It is a tale of childhood, of the theater, of the collateral damage of the riven twentieth century, of hatred, and, in the end, a tragic tale of love.

Author: Magda Szabó
ISBN-10: 1681377373
ISBN-13: 9781681377377
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Language: English
Published: 03/28/2023
Pages: 288
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.68lbs
Size: 7.98h x 5.24w x 0.61d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 03/06/2023
Kirkus Reviews 04/01/2023