Hats off to Jane for finding some really unusual—and unusually distinguished—books for us. This one promises to be quite a wild ride.

The reviewer for The Scotsman said, “No brief summary can do justice to the intelligence and moral complexity of this novel. I picked it up without expectation. I read it with gathering intensity, and a swelling admiration. I finished it, and straightaway started to read it again. It is unusual, original, and utterly compelling.”

Cynthia Zarin in The New Yorker wrote,

The book, which closely parallels events in Szabo’s own life, begins and ends with a dream; it reads like one, too—a fever dream, the shadow of a shadow.

It was first published in Hungary, in 1987, then here in 1995, and was reissued last year, in a new translation by Len Rix. A few weeks ago, in The New York Review of Books, Deborah Eisenberg referred to the “white-knuckled experience” of reading it. Writing about The Door, in the Times, the writer Claire Messed, who, like Eisenberg, found the book mesmerizing, went so far as to say, “It has altered the way I understand my own life.”

The brief summary that cannot do justice to the book is this: Magda, a writer who is educated, married to an academic, public-spirited, and with an on-again-off-again relationship to Hungary’s Communist authorities seeks a housekeeper. Emerence, a peasant, illiterate, impassive, abrupt, and seemingly ageless, takes the job. The Door is about their relationship.