Magda Szabo: Abigail Review

Abigail by Magda Szabo is the second book I chose for Read Independent Publishers as well as for Hungarian Literature month at Winstonsdad’ Blog. I read and liked it when it was originally published by New York Review Books in the US in 2019 with a wonderful translation by Len Rix. I have not read any other book by Szabo but the particular appeal of this book is that it is a Bildungsroman—a coming of age story. I really love this genre and as Rix so convincingly puts it, “it is a novel one can and one should return” and I did.

Abigail is also a historic fiction, set during the penultimate phase of World War II. It is the story of a fourteen-year old girl, Gina Vitay, a motherless and only child of a general in the Hungarian army. She is loved and cherished by her father and other family members, and her life in Budapest has been a privileged and cultured one. When the novel begins, Gina’s beloved governess, a French woman, is sent back to her home country and Gina is told without any explanation that she will be attending a boarding school away from Budapest —a fact kept secret from rest of her family. She and her father have a close and loving relationship, and not knowing the reason why she is being so abruptly uprooted she is uncomprehending and heartbroken. The months between fall 1943 to spring 1944 that Gina spends at the  Bishop Matula Academy in a remote part of Hungary is the heart of the story. 

The first several weeks at Matula goes badly for her, totally through her own fault. Being told that she cannot communicate with any of her family or friends, she is desperately longing for all the things she had to let go—her beautiful home, her friends at school, her boyfriend, her aunt’s parties and soirées, trips to the theater. Matula is not a fun and frolic place—a former Calvinist seminary converted to a girls boarding school, its setup is puritanical, highly regimented and strictly monitored. Her classmates are welcoming but Gina finds them immature and their secret games utterly childish. She is scornful when the they confide that Abigail, the girl statue in the garden, comes to the aid of girls who need help. When asked to join in their game, she throws a massive hissy fit and tells on them to the administration. She is hoping that it would get her thrown out of the school but what it gets her is a complete ostracization by her classmates. Eventually, she breaks through that cold wall of exclusion but not before she makes a disastrous attempt to run away from the school. When she pleads with her father to take her with him and tells him of her escape attempt, he finally reveals the reason for hiding her in Matula: Her father is a member of an underground group of army leaders that has been opposed to collaborating with the German army and if it comes in and occupies Hungary, he will be arrested. And that puts Gina at risk because they will use her as a hostage to force him to confess the names of the other members of the dissident group. He makes her promise that she will keep this a secret and not attempt to leave Matula unless it is him or someone trusted by him come to take her. What a burden to put on a fourteen year old! Loving and dutiful daughter that she is, she makes her promise. 

Even though she desperately misses her father and is frightened for his safety, typical resilience of youth and companionship and solidarity of other girls help her settle in her new school. But not for long. When outside forces come knocking on Matula’s doors, she makes a near fatal mistake of putting her trust in the wrong person risking not just her life but also of other students and adults at the school. When the book ends, Gina is once again spirited away, this time incognito, in the care of strangers.

Abigail is a coming-of-age story but also a war time story of children caught up in the dangerous and bloody games that adults play. Whatever adults get out of this game, for children it is nothing but displacement, loss, trauma and sometimes even death. We know that Gina comes back to Matula a year later (after the war ends) and we also know that she grows into full adulthood, married with children. Though the book is written as the events unfold but we are also made to think that she is looking back trying to make sense of that confusing and painful period of her life. When I finished the book, I wished that Szabo had written a sequel. I  would have liked to know how she survives that one year of hiding, how she deals with the death of her father and what kind of adult she grows to be. 

The book is completely centered on Gina and Szabo does a beautiful job of describing her thoughts and capturing her interiority. Gina comes off as a typical teen but she is also an interesting mix of sharp and the dense. She is observant but proves incapable of putting together the clues to figure out the real person behind the mythical Abigail. She learns from her mistakes but not before she brings heaps of trouble on herself. She thinks she is alone in the world but does not see that there are people looking out for her. But her heart is good and we get the impression that whatever the future brings, she will be sustained by the memories of her father’s love and the moral anchoring that Matula gives her. 

 

John Sayles Yellow Earth: Review

 

For this year’s  Reading Independent Publishers Month call, I read John Sayles Yellow Earth published by Haymarket Books. According to their website “Haymarket Books is a radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher based in Chicago. Our mission is to publish books that contribute to struggles for social and economic justice. We strive to make our books a vibrant and organic part of social movements and the education and development of a critical, engaged, international left.” A laudable mission, one after my own heart.

It is not surprising that Yellow Earth is part of their catalog. John Sayles used to be an indie small budget filmmaker and, one of my favorite directors. He came into prominence in the 80s with Matewan, Eight Men Out, Lone Star, Passion Fish, Sunshine State and The Secret of Ron Inish. His movies were critically acclaimed even if they did not make much money. Certain common themes run through all his movies: rapacity of capitalism; corruption in its institutions; exploitation of labor; class conflicts; struggles of working men and women; toxic racial bigotry; environmental destruction. Along with moviemaking, he has been building a parallel career track in fiction writing, which address on a more panoramic scale, many of the themes in his films—they are like big budget films on paper. Several of his novels are historical fiction with a handful of big characters whose stories stretch over several decades. Yellow Earth is not a decades-spanning historical fiction. It is very much a twenty-first century American story; all its action are compressed within a year; there are great many characters, all memorably written, but no single character is dominant. It is sweeping in scope with just one force driving the story—shale oil.

The novel, set in North Dakota (nicknamed Peace Garden State, why I don’t know), is divided into four sections—Exploration, Stimulation, Extraction and Absquatulation (which means leaving suddenly). North Dakota is about to experience massive oil boom with the advent of a sophisticated technology that uses horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to extract oil from the Bakken Formation, a massive subsurface source rock for oil (about 4 billion barrels). Lots of oil and, with oil selling at $104 dollars per barrel, lots of money. 

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When the novel begins, we are introduced to many characters—they catch your attention even if you don’t always remember their names. They are functionaries exploring the lay of the land—a salesman selling oil leases to property owners with mineral rights; a biologist monitoring a large colony of prairie dogs (which will be systematically exterminated to facilitate the laying of the pipeline); a geologist preparing his mineral survey report; a sheriff worried about the flood of outsiders coming into the town bringing with them crime, drugs and prostitution; a well meaning but misguided head of the tribal council wanting to make sure that his people are not cheated out of the spoils of the boom; a veteran of many boomtowns setting up a dive bar, a lap dancer looking to make good money in short time and, finally the residents of Yellow Earth and the Three Nations Reservation, many of whom have lands that sit atop a substantial chunk of Bakken. 

Sayles spends more time with some characters than others—he takes us on an entertaining long ride following the salesman as he glibly manipulates the landowners into signing the leases for oil extraction.

                          “I’m starting at fifty an acre,” he tells her. 

She laughs. “It’s not your money, Sig.” 

“They hire me cause I’m careful with it.” 

“If this rock pays anything like what they hope,” says Ginny, “careful is out the window.”

 “Anybody can wrap up a lease if they throw enough money at it,” says Sig. “To do it and maintain your company’s economic advantage requires a salesman.”

Stories of men who make the longest journey—the trucker who hauls drilling machinery from Houston to Yellow Earth, a journey of 1300 miles, all the time terrified that a piece of the machinery will fall off on the road and kill people in the cars behind or the illegal immigrant crossing from Mexico all the way to Yellow Earth, only to find that he has come a little late to the party—are the most poignant. This is not a story about oil barons, corporate bigwigs,  hotshot lawyers or powerful politicians. This is about people on the ground, cogs in the wheel—salesmen, long-haul truckers, drillers, mechanics, bartenders, lap dancers, bouncers—journeymen who have come to town to earn a living hoping that  drilling would go on for a long time but suspecting that it may not. This is also about the people of Yellow Earth and Three Nations Reservation—those who profit from the ownership of mineral rights and those who are made to bear the physical, environmental and social costs of fracking. (Actually, everyone bears the costs but for some the deal is sweetened by the monthly checks they get from the oil company.) 

If extractive capitalism is indifferent to the lives of the ordinary people who make its massive profits possible, Yellow Earth is not. Its pages are populated by many small characters sketched with care and empathy. When boom turns bust and they leave bruised and battered (some don’t, they die) we come to care about them too. 

Thanks for visiting.

Call and Response

 From inside the apartment, I don’t see them, only hear them. But that’s more than enough. 

Thanks for visiting, 

RECAP 2025

 

In terms of creativity it was somewhat a fallow year. Early in January, I completed the final version of Afterlives of a Newspaper.  I had submitted information about it to Kolaj Magazine Collage Books who were kind enough publicize it in their weekly newsletter and on their Instagram feed. As a result, I got several purchase requests but unfortunately I could not fulfill them because of tariff spat between India and US which had caused India to suspend all postal communications between the two countries. Because of prohibitive cost of shipping, I am not mailing anything from India right now. 

I responded to a few photography and collage calls for submission which were not successful. I wrote a couple of book reviews for All About Romance but did not want to do it regularly  (that site will cease publication by the end of this month but its archives will be available). Last year was the first year since I retired that I did not participate in workshops or residencies or take any course. Perhaps, I have plateaued in wanting to learn anything new. Last year, I also injured the fingers on my left hand hefting my big DSLR camera photographing birds from the terrace. DSLR photography has been on hold since then.
The only thing I did consistently was responding to Are You Book Enough monthly theme-based challenges. I did complete eleven out of twelve challenges-not bad for a newbie! It was an interesting challenge and it did stretch my creative muscles. Check out my instagram posts at  Indiragovi for the artist books I created for this challenge. The image at the bottom of this post is a tunnel book created in response to the theme of SPACE.

The video above shows the book I made for the month of December on the theme COLORS. 

Watch it with the sound on. 

Thanks for visiting. 

Arichal Munai, Where Two Ocean Bodies Meet

 

There are several geological reasons why the Bay of Bengal is calm and Indian Ocean so turbulent, but when you are standing at Arichal Munai, Dhanushkodi, where the two water bodies meet, you can only feel its mystical quality.  Dhanushkodi on Rameshwaram island is an uninhabited strip of land but plenty of visitors come here. We went there early morning before the sun was barely up, the crowd sparse and spent a serene hour just listening to the sound of lapping waves and being caught up in the geographic wonder of it. This was two years ago and I am ready to go again. 

After Lives of a Newspaper

 

This book of collage/mixed media/altered art came about because I could not bear to chuck the daily newspaper, the Hindu, into the wastepaper bin after I finished reading it. Three years ago, when I moved to Chennai, after 40+ years in the US, I subscribed to the print version of the Hindu as a way to know and understand this city and its people. It was a revelation. I had not read a newspaper in its physical form in more than fifteen years. I subscribed and still do to the digital version of the New York Times (it is simply cheaper than a print version). Over this period, I had come to accept the increasing algorithmization of my reading interests. I had also come to expect  a barrage of articles suddenly appearing based on my web search on a topic. I had come to accept the ‘once read, gone forever’ phenomenon too. I recognize that on a daily basis, the print newspaper also exercises  a lot of editorial control in deciding what to publish. But it does give me the freedom to choose what I want to read, discover interesting topics on my own. I did discover that the Hindu put out many articles that caught my interests. Lest I give the wrong impression, the Hindu is not new to me. A newspaper of record founded as a nationalist voice against British rule, it was an important historical source when I was working on my M.Phil dissertation more than four decades ago. Ironically, I read it on microfiche!

I am aware that all online newspapers, including The Hindu, track their readers, use algorithms to place the right kind of ads and share user information in various ways.

As I got familiar with the paper’s contents (its long read articles, Thursday-Sunday supplements, book reviews in Sunday magazine), I began to feel that I should preserve these in some form. As an artist I wanted to more than just simply clip and put them in a file folder. Thus Afterlives of a Newspaper was born. It is a collection of artistically altered news articles using collage and mixed-media techniques. The original contents are not lost. They are just creatively repositioned, edited, enhanced and illustrated. Of the many art pieces I have made over the last three years, 30-40 of them have made their way into this book. I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as I had enjoyed making them. Many thanks to The Hindu for sending me off on this creative journey.

                                                        

 

Recapping Pandemic Year

 

I did this piece of collage as a memorial to that intense and compressed pandemic period when none of us could go out and do anything. This was a record of not only what I did or did not do but also how abnormal it was then. With the pandemic having completely disappeared from the rear view mirror, it is even hard to remember how life was like then. How short memory can be!