Katalin Street By Hungarian author Magda Szabó begins brilliantly achingly and continues on throughout with a quiet melancholy, without loud and overly emotional declarations, but the pain you feel penetrates your soul. It takes place throughout the years 1934-1968 in Budapest--pre-wwii Post-wwii, and during the Stalinist era--however, in this quiet novel, the war is felt in the air, but only from a distance. We don't directly experience it, but only through the effect it has on the characters' lives. If it was a painting, I would imagine it as if the war were a distant background that we know is there but we don't focus on it, while the characters and their daily life is on the foreground and the center of our focus. We follow three families: the Biro, the Elekes, and the Held. At first, they were living on Katalin street and their houses were connected. They seem more like one family than three. The kids, the oldest boy Balint Biro, the Eleke siblings Iren and her youngest sister Blanca, and little Henriette Held are growing up very close to each other and all are, especially Balint, protective of little Henriette who is more introverted and shy than the rest of them. Every character has very different personality and their individual traits play a big role in how each one of them reacts and is transformed when tragedy hits and separates them. One thing is true: No one remains unchanged, and yet everyone is trying to hold on to a past that doesn't exist anymore. Everyone resists change and everyone is altered. We follow them closely and we watch as their lives turn from innocent and carefree, filled with hope for the future, to bleak and sorrowful, unable to move away from the past and deal with the losses. The war and the events that followed has broken them, but has it really broken their relationships and emotional connections or perhaps in some strange way has made them stronger? Is the past their friend holding them together or an enemy keeping them from moving forward? How different might their lives have been had the war never happened?

Szabo uses powerfully and realistically a non-linear timeline to connect the pieces of the characters' lives into a whole through their fragmented memories as they remember the events at random but significant moments of their lives. This and the lack of plot might require some patience as it takes time to understand what is going on, but the reader's patience will be well rewarded. Szabó doesn't just tell you how the characters feel or what they think in the expected way. Szabó clothes you with the skin of each character and their anguish becomes yours. You feel their yearning deep into your soul. You don't just understand or feel how they feel. You become them in a quiet and unexpected, unconscious way. Also, the nature or other material objects are not simply descriptions of the environmental setting, but essential elements deeply interconnected with the characters' emotional state and memories, and Szabó seems to achieve this perfectly. The homes of Katalin Street and the objects within, in our minds become alive as another character because of the tremendous significance and emotional weight they impose on the characters. Katalin Street is not a war novel though the setting is a war era. Katalin Street is a novel of relationships more than anything else: family relationships, romantic relationships, friendships, connections, betrayals, and losses, great losses in the physical sense and in the emotional sense. Losses that alter how the characters think, feel, act, and react. No one has peace, neither the living nor the dead. Everyone suffers in their own way and everyone tries to live tied to a past life and past hopes that have disintegrated. There is an unsettling and powerful quietude of emotion as everyone attempts in their own way to reconstruct the pieces, but they only succeed to get further away from each other and from the life they had dreamed as children. What is it or who is it that keeps them tied to Katalin Street? There is so much to be said about this book, and the one thing that really impressed me is Szabo's brilliant and unique manner of narration. The narration alternates from an unknown? third person omniscient narrator to the narration of Iren, which I feel makes us wonder how reliable Iren's memory of the events and point view is? Moreover, the relationship between the dead and the living is not what we would normally expect. There is only a fine line that separates the living from the dead, and at times they coexist even though the living are not aware of this. I wonder if by doing this, Szabo wants to signify that the emotional deadness and emptiness the characters feel and we even hear some of them expressing is not very far from being dead in the physical sense of the term. Life and death are not too far apart when the characters are living their lives as if they also died the day that 16 year old Henriette died (Not a spoiler). Physical death signifies no present or future, and the rest of the characters by remaining in the past are denying themselves the present and the future they could have had if they were to move forward without the guilt, regrets, trauma, and grief that has tied them down and causes them to continue destroying themselves and each other.