Running for Your Life: Open “The Door”

What stupefies in Magda Szabo’s “The Door” is how fresh and original is the imagined character, Emerence.

Crazy, contradictory, needlessly hurtful and harsh. Uncompromising to a fault.

How unconventional to choose to base a novel on an anti-hero upon whose first impressions we feel are so disjointed, let alone unsympathetic.

There you are: a cacophony of “un”s. By rights, she should be toxic to readers. Offer nothing.

Here, though, is the genius of “The Door.” Emerence proves that we are never free to judge what constitutes the human spirit.

What is one person’s toxicity is another’s purity. Emerence, like common humanity, is unknowable. She is someone we will never fully understand – nor forget.

Here’s the takeaway. Life is richer when we don’t rely on feeling superior to others for our sense of well-being. Emerence just is and that’s good enough.

Most fiction these days relies too often on the genius authorial, the post-modern wink, meism of one stripe or another.

Magic is in the point of view that shatters the self, that the reflection of the so-called superior other looms overlarge in the shards.

Next: Running for Your Life: It’s Core, Stupid  

0 comments: