Iza's Ballad

by Magda Szabó, George Szirtes (Introduction), George Szirtes (Translator)

Overview

From the author of The Door, selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2015

An NYRB Classics Original

Like Magda Szabó’s internationally acclaimed novel The Door, Iza’s Ballad is a striking story of the relationship between two women, in this case a mother and a daughter. Ettie, the mother, is old and from an older world than the rapidly modernizing Communist Hungary of the years after World War II. From a poor family and without formal education, Ettie has devoted her life to the cause of her husband, Vince, a courageous magistrate who had been blacklisted for political reasons before the war. Iza, their daughter, is as brave and conscientious as her father: Active in the resistance against the Nazis, she is now a doctor and a force for progress. Iza lives and works in Budapest, and when Vince dies, she is quick to bring Ettie to the city to make sure her mother is close and can be cared for. She means to do everything right, and Ettie is eager to do everything to the satisfaction of the daughter she is so proud of. But good intentions aside, mother and daughter come from two different worlds and have different ideas of what it means to lead a good life. Though they struggle to accommodate each other, increasingly they misunderstand and hurt each other, and the distance between them widens into an abyss. . . .

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681370347
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	10/18/2016
Series:	NYRB Classics Series
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	390,874
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Magda Szabó (1917–2007) was born into an old Protestant family in Debrecen, Hungary’s “Calvinist Rome,” in the midst of the great Hungarian plain. Szabó, whose father taught her to converse with him in Latin, German, English, and French, attended the University of Debrecen, studying Latin and Hungarian, and went on to work as a teacher throughout the German and Soviet occupations of Hungary in 1944 and 1945. In 1947, she published two volumes of poetry, Bárány (The Lamb), and Vissza az emberig (Return to Man), for which she received the Baumgartner Prize in 1949. Under Communist rule, this early critical success became a liability, and Szabó turned to writing fiction: Her first novel, Freskó (Fresco), came out in 1958, followed closely by Az őz (The Fawn). In 1959 she won the József Attila Prize, after which she went on to write many more novels, among them Katalin utca (Katalin Street, 1969), Ókút (The Ancient Well, 1970), Régimódi történet (An Old-Fashioned Tale, 1971), and Az ajtó (The Door, 1987). In 2015, the first American publication of The Door was named one of ten best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review. Szabó also wrote verse for children, plays, short stories, and nonfiction, including a tribute to her husband, Tibor Szobotka, a writer and translator who died in 1982. A member of the European Academy of Sciences and a warden of the Calvinist Theological Seminary in Debrecen, Szabó died in the town in which she was born, a book in her hand.

George Szirtes is a poet and translator of Hungarian literature. He is the author of the poetry collections The Slant Door (winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize), Bridge Passages, and Reel (winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize). He is a recipient of the 2013 Best Translated Book Award for his translation of László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango and was one of two translators who received prizes when Krasznahorkai won the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. Szirtes’s New
and Collected Poems was published in 2008.

Editorial Reviews

Szabo excels at summoning the delicate and wordless spaces between people who love each other; as the book goes on, the emotional layers build quietly and almost unbearably. You feel tragedy amassing, somehow, out of ineffable wisps of feeling. All along, Iza's faultlessness—the very goodness and resolute forward thinking that make her as cold and admirable as a saint—is what leads to her sad and lonely end. Some books, like some people, require great patience and attention to fully understand their complexity and beauty. Szabo teaches us lucky readers this very lesson through Iza's Ballad, one that perfect but songless Iza could never learn.

The New York Times Book Review - Lauren Groff

08/08/2016
In this contemplative family narrative, Szabó (The Door) introduces us to Ettie, and her daughter, Iza, shortly after Ettie’s husband, Vince, dies. Set in Hungary in 1960, the novel follows housewife Ettie in the days and weeks after Vince’s death. Iza, a successful doctor, tries to comfort her mother by arranging everything, but her efforts to tidy up her father’s estate only further isolate Ettie. Iza sells the rural family home and brings her mother to live with her in the big city of Pest. There, with live-in help, Ettie has no chores to complete and no one to talk to. “Everything required for comfort was present and correct but she still felt as though she had been robbed.” The story jumps around in time as Ettie nostalgically recalls her many years with Vince. Ettie is also fond of Antal, Iza’s ex-husband, who purchases their old home in the village, and she worries that Iza will never find a suitable replacement. Antal, however, falls in love with Lidia, the young nurse who cared for Vince in his final days. A subdued and melancholy meditation on grief and mourning, Szabó’s novel is the work of a sophisticated storyteller who confronts how memories are constructed. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"'The Door' has a vitality undimmed by time or translation. Its emotional ferocity, moral urgency and tincture of black magic made it feel new and urgent. 'Iza’s Ballad’ is no less relevant, a trenchant, unadulterated drama of old age and the loss of meaning…George Szirtes’s translation captures the story’s emotional turmoil at no cost to its clarity or directness. Even after years of obscurity, this novel has the breath and pulse of a living thing." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"Some books, like some people, require great patience and attention to fully understand their complexity and beauty. Szabo teaches us lucky readers this very lesson through Iza’s Ballad, one that perfect but songless Iza could never learn.” —Lauren Groff, The New York Times

"New York Review of Books Classics did English-speaking readers an enormous service when it published Hungarian writer Magda Szabo's tense and rending 'The Door' in 2015, and it has us another with this fall's release of her elegiac and elemental novel, 'Iza's Ballad.'...Szabo deftly explores not only the complications of life under communism in the mid-20th century, but also the idiosyncratic and individual failures of empathy that infiltrate human life no matter the time or place. She exposes how, in spite of ourselves, we often espouse and admire the noblest ideals even as we hurt and neglect the people who should be closest to us...Hermann Hesse, one of Szabo's mentors, once said of her, 'With Frau Szabo, you have caught a golden fish. Buy all of her novels, the ones she is writing and the ones she will write.' With 'Iza's Ballad' available in English, readers here in the States have — and should not miss — an additional chance to bask in Szabo's gold." —Kathleen Rooney, The Chicago Tribune

"This rich novel is a startling reminder that it is possible to speak regularly, and with good intentions, to family members without ever coming an inch closer to understanding one another." —Priyanka Kumar, Santa Fe New Mexican

“[A] compelling, affecting and a fascinating parable of mid-20th century progress… a study of the spaces between people, and what those represent.” —Pasha Malla, The Globe and Mail 

“[A] heartbreakingly beautiful novel...Szirtes conveys both the sophistication and simplicity of Szabó’s narrative in a superb translation......Just as The Door won an immediate English-language following, Iza’s Ballad is bound to become one of the most loved books of the year.” —The Irish Times

"Magda Szabo's work casts an indirect light upon the dimness that exists between our public and private selves, a place wherein our betrayals—both personal and political—flicker uneasily over the walls...Iza's Ballad should solidify Szabo's standing as a master novelist amongst her English-language readers." —Dustin Ilingworth, LitHub

“A ruthless exploration of the damage we inflict on one another in the name of love.” —The Independent

“Ghosts, angels, and demons hover in this quiet meditation on grief, love, and history." —Kirkus
 
“The writing has a lovely clarity and a relevance that is timeless.” —Kate Saunders, The Times (London)
 
“Szabó nails with incisive clarity the painful dynamics between the two [central] characters...A perceptive study of family relationships, bereavement and old age, it is harrowingly beautiful.” —Juanita Coulson, The Lady

From the Publisher

★ 2016-08-08
A man’s death changes reality for his widow and daughter. Originally published in Hungary in 1963, this newly translated novel by Prix Femina Etranger winner Szabó (1917-2007) (The Door, 2003, etc.) explores the clash of cultures between the country’s rural villages, mired in tradition, and its capital city, Budapest, uneasily sloughing off personal and collective memory. Szabó’s gentle, deliberate narrative begins in 1960 with the death of Vince Szócs, a judge whose career was truncated when he made a decision opposed by the rightist military regime; he was 66, already weakened by illness, when he was finally “rehabilitated.” He and his wife, Ettie, lived a simple, circumscribed, rustic life. Ettie “didn’t trust machines” or even “things as basic as electricity.” She preferred candles and toasting bread over a fire; “when the fire was lit she didn’t feel she was alone, not even when the house was empty.” The couple's daughter, Iza, takes charge the moment Vince dies, insisting that her mother come to Budapest, where Iza is a respected, well-paid physician. "What a delight it must be to move to Budapest,” neighbors thought, “to leave sad memories behind and to enjoy a happy old age in new circumstances.” But Ettie becomes disoriented and lonely in her daughter’s modern apartment, where a housekeeper cleans and cooks, where she has no friends and nothing to do, and where she cannot feel Vince’s spirit. As the story unfolds, Szabó reveals the complexities of the past, not only for Ettie, but also for Iza, whose coldness and self-discipline seem inexplicable to many who know her; Iza’s estranged husband; and his fiancee, a nurse who once deeply revered Iza but comes to pity her: "The poor woman believes that old people’s pasts are the enemy,” Lidia realizes. “She has failed to notice how those pasts are explanations and values, the key to the present.” Ghosts, angels, and demons hover in this quiet meditation on grief, love, and history.

Kirkus Reviews