“From this moment onwards, Gina, your childhood is over. After she’s made privy to a secret that if known could wreak havoc, she will have to learn “dignity and self-discipline”.Īlthough the narrative obliquely hints at this possibility of danger and violence, an atmosphere of apprehension prevails. Our heroine is initially oblivious to the threat looming over her country and she’s far more concerned with the various dramas that make up her everyday life at her exclusive all-girls school. Similarly to The Door, Abigail presents its readers with a narrative that is fraught with a quiet suspense.
Szabó however permeates this tale of youthful innocence and friendships with an air of unease. Abigail, on the other hand, is deceptively simple in that it may at first strike readers as a conventional coming-of-age. While I was enthralled by Szabó’s prose, I was ultimately left feeling rather mystified by the whole ordeal. Last year I read, and was perturbed by, Magda Szabó’s The Door.
First published fifty years ago, its English translation has only just come out (Len Rix’s translation does not disappoint). “In later years, whenever she dreamed of the fortress and the city the wind would always be present, moving restlessly among human figures obscurely glimpsed in the haze.”Ībigail follows fourteen-year-old Gina Vitay’s time as a Matula student in the months leading to the German occupation of Hungary.
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