Abigailby Magda Szabo
Translated from: Hungarian
Rating: ★★★★½
Publication Date: January 1, 1970
Genre: fiction
Pages: 333
ReRead?: No
Abigail, the story of a headstrong teenager growing up during World War II, is the most beloved of Magda Szabó’s books in her native Hungary. Gina is the only child of a general, a widower who has long been happy to spoil his bright and willful daughter. Gina is devastated when the general tells her that he must go away on a mission and that he will be sending her to boarding school in the country. She is even more aghast at the grim religious institution to which she soon finds herself consigned. She fights with her fellow students, she rebels against her teachers, finds herself completely ostracized, and runs away. Caught and brought back, there is nothing for Gina to do except entrust her fate to the legendary Abigail, as the classical statue of a woman with an urn that stands on the school’s grounds has come to be called. If you’re in trouble, it’s said, leave a message with Abigail and help will be on the way. And for Gina, who is in much deeper trouble than she could possibly suspect, a life-changing adventure is only beginning.
I was, unfortunately, never able to find my copy of The Fifth Business by Robertson Davies, which I had planned to read for the 1970 Club. It’s somewhere in my house, but where?
Anyway, when I was trolling about for something (else) to read, I noticed that this one was first published in 1970. I had bought a copy of the NYRB edition at a library sale at some point, and I was able to find it because I keep all of my NYRB’s on a single shelf, where they look wonderful.
I really loved this book. I didn’t have any baseline of expectation for it when I opened it, but suffice it to say that I was not expecting a Hungarian boarding school story set at the bitter end of WWII, when the Germans invaded their former allies in Hungary.
Gina was a very interesting character – strongwilled, but also a vain and coddled teenager who is forced to grow up in a hurry after her father, a high-ranking officer in the Hungarian army who can see clearly the unhappy future that is unfolding, for both his country and for him, personally, packs her off to a boarding school. He is trying to keep her whereabouts a secret so that she cannot be used against him, as he is fully expecting to be captured and tortured at some point.
Gina’s dramatic misery at the boarding school, coping with her change from a lighthearted social life in Budapest to an implacably austere religious school, is both agonizing and somehow very funny. The end, with Gina’s desperate flight to avoid capture by enemies of her father, is gripping.
Szabo wrote two other books that have been translated and published by NYRB Classics – Katalin Street and The Door. I will definitely read both.