A New Book by Magda Szabó (author of The Door)
The process of growing old bears little resemblance to the way it is presented, either in novels or in works of medicinal 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. There came too the realization that advancing age had taken the past, which in childhood and early maturity had seemed to them so firmly rounded off and neatly parceled up, and ripped it open. Everything that had happened was still there, right up to the present, but now suddenly different. Time had shrunk to specific moments, important events to single episodes, familiar places to the mere backdrop to individual scenes, so that, in the end, they understood that of everything that had made up their lives thus far only one or two places, and a handful of moments, really mattered. Everything else was just so much wadding around their fragile existences, wood shavings stuffed into a trunk to protect the contents on the long journey to come. They had discovered too that the difference between the living and the dead is merely qualitative, that it doesn’t count for much. And they had learned that in everyone’s life there is only one person whose name can be cried out in the moment of death.
—The first, introductory chapter of Katalin Street by Magda Szabó, author of The Door, translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix.
This is the third novel of Szabó’s published by NYRB Classics; she’s rapidly become one of our most beloved authors.
Katalin Street comes out on September 12 and has received great early buzz: Publishers Weekly labelled it “a brilliant and unforgettable novel” and Kirkus called it “A visceral, sweeping depiction of life in the shuddering wake of wartime.”
Photograph courtesy of The Mookse and the Gripes blog. Find them on twitter @mookse.
