Let's Eat and Talk About The Fawn

Let's eat and talk about The Fawn by Magda Szabo. From NYRB: 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.
We've read several other excellent Szabo books for this club (Katalin Street, Abigail, The Door), and The Fawn looks like it'll be just as rewarding. This will likely be a one-off, but who knows. Join us!