The Door (novel)

Novel by Magda Szabó

The Door is a novel by Hungarian writer Magda Szabó. The Door was originally published in Hungary in 1987, and translated into English in 1995 by Stefan Draughon for American publication, and again in 2005 by Len Rix for British publication. Rix's translation won the 2006 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and was short listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Rix's translation was republished in 2015 by New York Review Books Classics. A film based on the novel, directed by István Szabó, was released in March 2012.

The novel begins with Magda, the narrator, recounting the recurring dream that haunts her in her old age. As Magda explains, after waking up from this dream, she is forced to face the fact that "I killed Emerence". The author, Magda Szabó, was also an educated writer and married to an academic, the Hungarian translator Tibor Szobotka. Events from the book such as Magda being sent to Greece as part of the Hungarian delegation for a literary conference could easily have been taken from the life of the author, and the award that the character Magda receives from the Hungarian Parliament in the story could be easily exchanged with one of the many awards that the author has won. Even the on again off again relationship that Magda in the book enjoys with the Hungarian government is evocative of Szabo's relationship with that same institution; while she did win many national literary awards, she was also labelled an "enemy of the people" by the Communist government, was fired from the Ministry of Education, and had her books banned from publication from 1949 to 1956.