Explore

Explore the world through its stories.

Browse the different options and select a country to discover a book and a film that offer different windows into its culture, history and identity.

Drag to move · scroll to zoom

20 countries · 40 recommendations

New countries join the map every week.

Browse available countries as a list

Europe

Hungary

Hungary's modern identity has been shaped by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, two world wars, fascism, decades of communist rule and the transition that followed 1989. Budapest carries many of these layers visibly, but Hungarian literature and cinema often approach history through something more intimate: families, relationships, private memories and the emotional lives people protect from the outside world. There is often a tension between what can be said publicly and what remains behind closed doors.

HungaryThe DoorMagda Szabó

The Door

Az ajtó

Magda Szabó

First published: 1987
Genre: Literary fiction
Language: Hungarian
Length: 272 pages

About the book

A writer named Magda hires Emerence, an older woman with a fierce personality and an almost legendary reputation as a housekeeper. Over many years the two women build an unusually intense friendship, even as Emerence keeps parts of her past and private life firmly inaccessible. Their relationship eventually reaches a moment when love, trust and the belief that one person knows what is best for another become painfully difficult to separate.

Why this book

I thought you'd like this because it asks one of those uncomfortable questions that becomes more interesting the longer you think about it: how much access do we really have the right to expect from another person, even when we love them? Emerence's closed door becomes much more than a physical boundary. Everyone carries rooms inside themselves that other people may never completely enter. The book made me think about how knowing someone deeply can also mean respecting the parts of them that remain their own.

Cultural context

Szabó lived through some of the most turbulent decades of twentieth-century Hungarian history, including wartime Hungary and communist rule. Her work frequently explores private relationships against societies in which identity, loyalty and what could safely be said were never entirely simple. The Door keeps politics largely outside the foreground, but the importance of secrecy, trust, dignity and personal autonomy carries the imprint of that historical experience.

Read the book

Find a digital edition

Official Penguin UK / Vintage Digital ebook record, translated by Len Rix; ebook ISBN 9781446443798.

Why these two together?

The Door is about the boundaries around another person's inner life, while On Body and Soul is about two people trying to cross those boundaries. One asks whether intimacy can go too far; the other asks whether fear can prevent intimacy from going far enough. Together they offer a quiet exploration of trust, vulnerability and how difficult it can be to truly know another person.

Before you go

01Learn a little about Hungary's twentieth-century history before treating Budapest only as an imperial European capital.
02Notice how private memory and public history often overlap in Hungarian art.
03Pay attention to the contrast between grand architecture and the much quieter everyday lives happening inside it.
04Remember that understanding another person does not always require knowing everything about them.