Magda Szabó’s The Door is a character study of elderly Hungarian housekeeper Emerence. She’s one of the old guard: a woman of the fields; uneducated, but astute, tireless, and indomitable. She picks her own hours, her own chores, and her own employers - one of the book’s many reversals of norm.

At the start of the story Emerence comes to work for Magda, a young writer, and it’s from Magda’s point of view that the story is told. It’s a confession, really. The two women repel each other and yet bind fast too, smothering and stabbing each other with a thousand petty manipulations.

We know from the outset this is a tragedy, and much of the tension is in wondering what will happen to Emerence at the end. But it’s a long journey there. There is little dialogue and almost no white space on the page.

Every night I had to make up those hours spent away from my typewriter. Writing isn’t an easy taskmasker. Sentences left unfinished never continue as well as they had begun. New ideas bend the main arch of the text, and it never again sits perfectly true. (100)

The writing is lovely, each sentence carefully carrying more than its load of words. Magda’s comments on the writing process were some of the highlights for me. I certainly admired the text, the phrasing, the dark humour - it would make meaty study material, but I didn’t love The Door. I’m not sure I even enjoyed it. But I stuck to it, as dogged as Emerence with her shovel in the snow.