There are stories that harbor a continuous sense of macbethian drama. Eszter's story is that self-fulfilling tragedy, which is the same, a surrender to self-destruction. But it is not a nihilistic idea about the world, quite the contrary. Eszter would like to be, to become like those other people who are reflected in their mirrors of perfect lives, mirrors that Eszter herself builds as an unbearable counterweight to her own frustrations.
Magda Szabó, the most renowned Hungarian novelist knows what to do with Eszter. With this character, he navigates the depths of the human being, through the inscrutable interstices where viscera and soul rub against each other.
Frustration is, along with fear, the most limiting sensation of the human being. All time devoted to this lost cause among the most lost is a concession to your own defeat. Only, for Eszter it is probably too late to somehow sublimate her vital negative impression on the basis of her frustration.
On the other side of her distortion of the world is Angéla ...
The most curious of all is that Eszter has a social recognition. She is the great theater actress in whom Angéla should be reflected with idolatry. Therein lies one of the greatest contradictions of our existence.
Beyond the intense notions about life that this dichotomy of diffuse characters, heroine and antiheroine of our own limitations offers us, the novel advances thanks to the construction of Eszter's revenge.
Because when evil overcomes her, when obsession sustains her entire life, Eszter is able to give full revenge on her being and her time spent in the shadow of that other person who seems so happy, much to her misfortune.
And it is that even fate turns against him. Angéla in the past, when they shared school, and the same splendorous Angéla in her adulthood. Her destiny is presented to her in those moments as two superimposed photographs towards her despair.
Eszter finally succumbs to his poisoned mind. And the consequences are that tragic closure, that final slam into the labyrinth of madness.
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