“The Fawn” itself is the product of such a gap: Szabó wrote it in secret, during a period of almost a decade when Hungary’s postwar Stalinist regime prohibited her from publishing. The notion of a time without speech, a gap severing past from present, was among the central preoccupations of Szabó’s career, which spanned seven decades before her death in 2007. The narrative shuttles frenetically across this gap, from their provincial childhoods during the Second World War to their adult lives in Budapest in the early nineteen-fifties. It depicts the tumultuous reunion of the bitter and brilliant Eszter with her former playmate, the cherubic Angéla, after a decade apart. “The Fawn” is a chronicle of silence and all that roils beneath it. For most of what follows, the identity of the “you” to whom Eszter addresses the novel is withheld from the reader, as are the reasons for her reticence. But silence isn’t an easy habit to break. The novel is her belated, wandering attempt at finally unburdening herself. She has spent years fashioning a life out of silence. Eszter is an actress she needs a script to speak. “I have come to realize that if I can’t bear to speak the truth even to you then I am beyond all help,” Eszter Encsy, the narrator of Magda Szabó’s 1959 novel, “ The Fawn,” says.

Abigél by Magda Szabó