Katalin Street

Starred review from July 17, 2017
The latest from Szabó (The Door) is a gorgeous elegy for the joy and the life once shared among three neighboring families—the Elekes, the Temes, and the Helds—in prewar Budapest, following the residents through the German invasion in 1944, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and the miserable quiet of the 1960s. At the heart of the story is Iren, the Elekes’ older daughter, who in 1944 is a beautiful and hardworking school teacher poised to begin the happy life she feels entitled to lead. But on the day that she and Balint, son of the Temes family next door, announce their engagement, the Helds—who are Jewish—are taken away. Their teenager daughter, Henriette, has remained with Iren’s and Balint’s families for protection and yet, before the night is over, her presence will be discovered, with catastrophic consequences that will haunt everyone for the rest of their lives. Readers will be impressed by the brilliant texture and forthrightness of Szabó’s prose, along with the particular urgency she infuses into the humiliations and irrational longings that comprise her characters’ lives, even or especially during the shock of war. All the while, Iren maintains her work ethic, as if by grading papers she can hold fast to some larger sense of order, even though the chaos of the world has murdered her neighbors, ruined her future, and destroyed her country. This is a brilliant and unforgettable novel.

July 15, 2017
Three families, whose lives are inextricably linked by the street they inhabit, grapple with love and morality amid political upheaval.In English for the first time and impeccably translated by Rix (The Door, 2015), Szabo's quietly captivating novel excavates the tangled history of Hungary's capital from the portentous moments before the German occupation to its suffocating postwar regime. In 1934, enveloped by a garden "teeming with roses," we meet Iren and Blanka Elekes, Balint Biro, and Henriette Held, the beloved children of three neighboring families who live on the titular Katalin Street. The four of them are inseparable, like cousins, apart from the fact that each of the girls, at one time or another, has loved Balint, the major's son. "Balint was the sort of person who inspired that response from others without in the least intending to," Iren observes. "You simply had to love him." In Iren's case, her unuttered desires are requited when she and Balint are engaged a decade later. As soon as their celebration begins, though, it's disrupted by a phone call and eclipsed by the reality of war; Henriette's Jewish parents have been caught and deported and their home swiftly commandeered by authorities. But it's the tragic death of 16-year-old Henriette, who's been hidden by the major and the Elekes family, that ultimately tears these families apart. By the time they're eventually married, Balint, who adored Henriette like his own sister, and Iren, who both loved and loathed the girl, are strangers, having long ago buried the happiness they once knew. Beset by a deep malaise from the aftershock of war, the Elekes family, forced from their home and dispossessed in every sense, live as ghosts, the past forever looping in their consciousnesses, "locked in the same hopeless quest to recover [Katalin Street]." And Henriette, a spectral presence hovering throughout the novel, acts as an onlooker, bearing witness to the emotional decay brought on by the relentless forces of age and memory. A visceral, sweeping depiction of life in the shuddering wake of wartime.

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