“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. Eszter is an actress; she needs a script to speak. She has spent years fashioning a life out of silence. The novel is her belated, wandering attempt at finally unburdening herself. But silence isn’t an easy habit to break. 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.
“The Fawn” is a chronicle of silence and all that roils beneath it. It depicts the tumultuous reunion of the bitter and brilliant Eszter with her former playmate, the cherubic Angéla, after a decade apart. 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.
Read Full Article »
