Book Review: Abigail by Magda Szabo

This book was translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix.

I think we can all be guilty sometimes of assuming that people who lived a long time ago (and by extension, books written by and about people who lived a long time ago), aren’t going to be relatable to us in the modern era. And so even though Abigail is only set less than a hundred years ago and published merely 15 years before I was born, I was surprised to find it so fresh and compelling.

Set in Hungary in the final years of World War II, Abigail follows less than a year in the life of young Gina Vitay. Gina is a gregarious, somewhat spoiled teenage girl who has lived her life in Budapest. Her father is a general and although her mother died when she was young, Gina has lived a full life with her beloved French governess and her doting aunt. She attends operas, visits art museums, and mingles with a genteel crowd in her aunt’s salons. She’s spoiled but not rotten, naive and sheltered and very much like a million other teenage girls throughout time.

She doesn’t know why her father suddenly wants to send her away to boarding school but she’s horrified at the school he takes her to. It’s deep in the country, far away from Budapest, deeply religious, and built like a fortress. Gina doesn’t understand that the war is not going well and that the choices her father is making may put her increasingly at risk. The rules at the school are strict, with nearly every moment of the girls’ lives scheduled, and an upset Gina makes a mistake early on that causes the rest of her class to turn against her. Deeply unhappy and alone, her only ally seems to be Abigail, a stone statue in the school gardens that legend says will help any of the girls who are in need.

There’s not much about Gina individually that makes her stand out and this is perhaps why she makes the perfect character to follow through this year. She’s naive, though not through any fault of her own. Her father is grappling with enormous consequences and yet she, like so many young people, is entirely self-focused. Szabo writes this beautifully and subtly. Gina’s tragedies are the loss of her personal belongings and her lack of friends in the school and Szabo sets this against the backdrop of a country falling apart, coming further and further under the thumb of a dictator. It’s terrifying how relatable this is now in 2025.

Szabo strews hints through so that I didn’t feel like it was hard to figure out who Abigail really was, even as Gina assigns credit to everyone else. Again, this is done with skill so I never felt like I was looking down at Gina. She has only the information available to her and lacks the insight of character that future years will give her. She struggles to see beyond the obvious flaws and foibles of the adults in her life or to understand them as fully-fledged humans, but how many of us were the same as teenagers?

A masterful work and certainly one I would recommend now.