Last week was so hot that I had little energy to move. Luckily, I had two books at hand that kept me sufficiently engaged, so that I could forgot about the outside world. One was Catalina (2024), by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, and the other was Katalin Street (1969), by Magda Szabó (Katharinenstrasse, in the German translation.)
Small volumes, as different as can be, and yet they hone in on a similar question: how are individual choices, our values, our ability to connect, affected by historical and political circumstances that create existential trauma, by a past that afflicts the present and the future in ways beyond our control?
Cornejo Villavicencio is a young writer whose nonfiction debut, The Undocumented Americans, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award. The collection of essays combined personal narrative with reported profiles of some of the most vulnerable immigrant workers in the United States. Her new book is a novel with strong autobiographical content, a coming of age of an undocumented immigrant from Equador who ends up at Harvard, and whose fate is determined by the absence of a green card, once she finishes school. It garnered raving reviews, but I found it at times difficult to read. (The author, as it turns out, received permanent residency in 2020 and was as of that date a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Yale.)
The first person singular perspective oscillates between smart analysis, insight into self and others with biting humor, slyly introducing us to the issues of stereotyping from multiple perspectives. It puts a glaring spotlight on structural obstacles to acquiring citizenship, to belonging in other ways defined by elite institutions, and onto the repeat experiences and subsequent fear of abandonment. It elucidates how the fears about an uncertain future can poison the present, stunt you in all your helplessness to make the right one come about, victim to pandering political decisions of a nation.
But the stream of consciousness, the gushing language and relentless pace made it feel like a wave that tried to rip you into its emotional undertow, pushing you forwards without catching a breath, and eventually cresting, abruptly ending without a sense that the story was fully told – leaving everything and everyone sort of floating in the water. Maybe we are supposed to feel that way, the closest we can come to vicariously experiencing being battered by external forces, but it was exhausting.
——
Nobel Prize laureate Herman Hesse, after reading a forbidden translation of one of Szabó’s novels, called his publisher in haste to tell him he had “caught a golden fish”. I could not agree more. Her more recent novel Katalin Street is everything I want from a remarkable piece of literature: precise language, a challenging structure of alternating between narrators and eras, a focus on female characters who escape conformity, and a philosophical deepening of questions around history’s effects on our lives.
The story is told from the perspectives of various members of three families thrown together as neighbors in the titular street in Budapest, Hungary, starting with the early years before German occupation and ending during the communist regime of the 1960s. Complex relationships – three girls all vie for one boy, three parent generations are driven by different values – are torn apart by the deportation of one Jewish couple, and the death of their daughter at the hands of a Nazi soldier, but accidentally caused by one of her former playmates.
The survivors end up together in a post-war apartment, longingly gazing at the houses that were taken from them during the social rehousing program of the communist regime, as punishment for a bourgeois existence. They are unable to communicate to overcome their sorrow, or grieve together for a past that is irredeemable. Love yields to guilt, and one of them is exiled, harming the family even more. They live in a constant state of fear of prosecution, and appear in their nostalgia, isolation and endless fatigue as if they were ghosts, unable to speak to each other or the one real ghost, their murdered childhood friend, who regularly visits to add her own observations.
I think as someone who grew up in 1950’s Germany among a population of perpetrators the issue of silence is particularly pertinent. Trauma instills silence, regardless of concerning perpetrators or victims. Values disintegrate, memory fades, all fostered by silence driven by fear to re-live the trauma, or inclination to veil it forever to absolve oneself. The titular Katalin, by the way, was St. Katherine of the Wheel, a major Catholic Saint and martyr, who is, surely no coincidence, a patron for philosophers, invoked for diseases of the tongue (the inability to speak) and protection against a sudden death (obviously not working for Jewish neighbors.)
Caravaggio: Die Heilige Katharina von Alexandrien(1595–1596)
She was not a historically established figure. In fact some scholars speculate that the story of her life and persecution was the inversion of something that actually happened: a famous female Greek philosopher and mathematician from Alexandria, Hypatia, was murdered by Christians. The role reversal of persecuted and persecutor would surely fit into the intellectual framework of Szabó’s narrative. (So would the generally clever choices of names for the main protagonists, explorations of which could fill an entire session of a book group…)
What made the book special to me, though, had to do with explorations of aging – no surprise here. Here is an example of the clarity of vision found in all of her writing:
“The process of growing old bears little resemblance to the way it is presented, either in novels or in works of medical science.
No work of literature, and no doctor, had prepared the former residents of Katalin Street for the fierce light that old age would bring to bear on the shadowy, barely sensed corridor down which they had walked in the earlier decades of their lives, or the way it would rearrange their memories and their fears, overturning their earlier moral judgments and system of values.
They knew they should expect certain biological changes: that the body would set about its work of demolition with the same meticulous attention to detail that from the moment of conception it had applied to the task of preparing itself for the journey ahead. They had accepted that there would be alterations in their appearance and a weakening of the senses, along with changes in their tastes, their habits, and their needs; that they might fall prey to gluttony or lose all interest in food, become fear-ridden or hypersensitive and fractious. They had resigned themselves to the prospect of increasing difficulties with digestion and sleeping, things they had taken for granted when young, like life itself.
But no one had told them that the most frightening thing of all about the loss of youth is not what is taken away but what is granted in exchange. Not wisdom. Not serenity. Not sound judgment or tranquility. Only the awareness of universal disintegration.”
The only antidote is the ability to continue to love, something enabled by life’s choices, or obstructed by them, depending where the chips fell. No, not where they fell, but where we put them. After all, as Szabo spells out :
“In everyone’s life there is only one person whose name can be cried out in the moment of death.”
The author died in 2007. I wonder what her last words were. But I delighted in her vision of the after life, as described in the novel, a place where people revert to child-like beings, happily embraced and treated as such during reunions with their deceased parents. Maybe you CAN go home again, albeit in a fantasy world….
The focus, though, is on the emptiness created by a longing for a past that prevents the existence of a meaningful present. The desire to turn back the clock, make choices that reinstate the nostalgic past before we acted in harmful ways, adds up to the ultimate emotional destruction of the survivors of those consequential actions. That is true for all, regardless of where the desire is coming from, narcissism, disconsolate longing, or guilt. In an ingenious move, the author lets us look at the disastrous effects of the idea that time can be folded into itself, past resurrected in the present, even for those who have left time behind – the central ghost of the story.
If all this sounds pretty bleak, yes it is. Let me assure you, the book is worth it. There are so many discoveries to be made, so many nuggets to be found in the universes she creates, a whole school of golden fish. Including many reminders that passive acceptance of “rules of law” during totalitarian regimes, silence rather than opposition, lead inevitably to disaster.
Photographs today are from Austria and Slovenia, parts of the Habsburg Empire, as was Hungary. I have never been to Budapest, alas, but the architecture is said to be the same.
Music today is Bartok’s Sixth String Quartet. Someone said this about its last movement: “The final movement is both a release and a wonder. It is the Mesto theme presented in a language of deep sensitivity, perhaps resignation, perhaps numbed grief.”