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Katalin Street

Katalin Street

by Magda Szabó, translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix

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WINNER OF THE 2018 PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE

In prewar Budapest three families live side by side on gracious Katalin Street, their lives closely intertwined. A game is played by the four children in which Bálint, the promising son of the Major, invariably chooses Irén Elekes, the headmaster’s dutiful elder daughter, over her younger sister, the scatterbrained Blanka, and little Henriette Held, the daughter of the Jewish dentist.

Their lives are torn apart in 1944 by the German occupation, which only the Elekes family survives intact. The postwar regime relocates them to a cramped Soviet-style apartment and they struggle to come to terms with social and political change, personal loss, and unstated feelings of guilt over the deportation of the Held parents and the death of little Henriette, who had been left in their protection. But the girl survives in a miasmal afterlife, and reappears at key moments as a mute witness to the inescapable power of past events.

As in The Door and Iza’s Ballad, Magda Szabó conducts a clear-eyed investigation into the ways in which we inflict suffering on those we love. Katalin Street, which won the 2007 Prix Cévennes for Best European novel, is a poignant, somber, at times harrowing book, but beautifully conceived and truly unforgettable.

Download the reading group guide for Katalin Street.szabo szabo

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681371528
Pages: 248
Publication Date:

Praise

The story of four neighboring families in Budapest whose lives are upended by World War II, Szabo's bewitching novel is the most convincing ghost story I've ever read. You feel this towering Hungarian novelist might have actually figured out the mystery of the afterlife.
—Nell Freudenberger, The Week

In Katalin Street, the past is never dormant, never settled. The past is an open wound, a life force busily shaping an increasingly bewildering present. In describing Henriette's plight, Szabó writes: "From the moment she arrived she had been left to work out the rules and the customs of the place entirely by herself." In this extraordinary novel, the same could be said for the living.
—Laura van den Berg, The New York Times Book Review

"Szabó sketches an unforgettable portrait of the Elekes family.... This is the rare book that you’ll finish and want to go right back to the beginning to reread the first two chapters, if only to better understand Irén’s fate.
—Priyanka Kumar, Santa Fe New Mexican

[Szabó's] prose is a powerful reminder of just how resonant the relationship between language and memory can be, especially when entangled within the matrices of families and communities living under the shadow of fascism...[Katalin Street] is a brightly shining star in the Szabó universe, offering us a glimpse of Eastern Europe at a time when we need to be reminded of what happened there more than ever.
—World Literature Today

Magda Szabó's moving novel Katalin Street explores the way the past is alive in the present, still shaping life in mysterious ways that are hard to understand....Eliciting a bittersweet beauty, Katalin Street is a powerful novel about life, death and humanity's elusive sense of place and purpose.
—Scott Neuffer, Shelf Awareness

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...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....This is a brilliant and unforgettable novel.
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

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, Szabó'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….A visceral, sweeping depiction of life in the shuddering wake of wartime.
—Kirkus, starred review

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