Reading in translation: The Door

Magda Szabó, The Door: 

We live in good times for literature in translation, of this there can be little doubt. But as the general availability of literature in translation improves, we begin to get into an uncertain place to judge canonicity and quality. For Dostoesvky there's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov and a lot of argument about everything else; for Balzac there's Pere Goriot and (these days) Lost Illusions, and then a lot of uncertainty. And the part of me that is still an academic does wonder where individual books or authors are meant to fit in, even though I've come around to the idea that order and hierarchy are rarer than they first seemed, and mostly one's life as a reader is finding the things that interest you and going with those.

And yet, and yet. There was something in The Door that compelled me, literally compelled me to read and keep reading and push off my other reading projects. Perhaps it is the mother-daughter angle, to read a book about knowing someone so fully as to understand them without words and yet not really understand anything about them at all; that this will happen or that they will feel a certain way but a sort of mysterious dust comes up to forever obscure the why, even when you know the pieces of why--that can't be all!