As I’m teaching Magda Szabó’s Katalin Street, I keep asking myself, “Why am I drawn to this book?” I’ve only read it twice, once last summer and again this semester in preparation for teaching it. Yet, I keep feeling like Katalin Street is one of those novels, like those of Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, or others, that I will come back to again and again over the course of my life. It is a novel that speaks to our very existence, the ways we remember moments in our lives and the ways we confront death and the passing of those we love. The opening section of the novel concludes with the narrator stating, referencing the main characters, “They had discovered too that the difference between the living and the dead is merely qualitative, that it doesn’t count for much.”

The chasm between the living and the dead is not as far as we’d like to think. We envision that once someone removes this mortal coil they cease to exist, they dissipate or disintegrate back into the earth. Yet, that is not what happens. We are not merely made up of flesh, blood, muscles, nerves, and other components. No, we are made up of our thoughts, our actions, the wadding that fills out our skeletal frames and makes us who we are as individuals. While the casing may cease to exist, disintegrating over time till it can no longer function, the things we have said, done, and created remain long after the casing returns from whence it came.

From the outset of the novel, we know that Henriette Held exists in a liminal space, a space between life and death. She gets murdered in 1944, but she exists throughout the novel, moving back and forth between the ethereal world where her soul and mind continue to exist, where she encounters the solider who killed her, her parents who were murdered in an extermination camp, and others. She also comes back to the physical, temporal world, interacting with Bálint, Irén, Blanka, and others who remain.

Her returns to Katalin Street, to the physical world, “made a lot of people jealous” because not everyone had the ability to return, to walk the halls and streets of their former lives. Following her arrival in “that place,” the afterlife, the solider arrived. We don’t know how the soldier who murdered Henriette dies; we just know that he comes to “that place.” When he arrives, Henriette realizes he can’t hurt her anymore; in fact, “[h]e had forgotten everything.” He did not remember her at all; instead, he would lay his head in his hands and talk to her about his desire to “get back to his lost family,” to see them once more.

Along with the soldier, Henriette also encounters her parents in “that place,” and they d not “attempt to explain what sort of world it was that she would henceforth be living in.” Rather, they would undergo a “constant transformation” from her parents to children, moving back to their own childhood memories. All of those who arrived “as mature adults” would undergo these changes. While Henriette would return to Katalin Street, her mother would go “to the house she had grown up in; and . . . likewise her father visited his own childhood home.”

Everyone in that place — Henriette, her parents, the soldier — goes back to moments that mean something to them, that stand out to them. They return to “one or two places, and a handful of moments, [that] really mattered.” They discard the “wood shavings stuffed into a trunk” to fill it out and go back to those times that mattered to them, for whatever reason. Our lives are full of moments, the majority of which pass by without us even noting them. Everyday we collect moments, yet we do not recall these moments. Instead, we return, again and again, to specific moments that impact us, whether those are moments that make us feel safe, scared, or any other emotion.

Even when we remember, we do not remember things as a whole. We recall parts, like the pieces of a puzzle that fit together to form a complete image. Bálint’s memories of the play that him, Henirtte, Blanka, and Irén performed for the Major’s thirty-fifth birthday come back to him not as a fully formed image but as parts, or colors, that form his own recollection. While others who were there forgot about the celebration, Bálint remembered it, but “even for him the picture was incomplete. It survived in separate segments, like an orange, that kept returning at random moments later throughout his life.”

He thought back to that day in 1934 at three specific moments in his life: when the soldier murdered Henriette, when he was captured during the siege of Budapest, and in 1952 when “they began to question him at the start of his disciplinary hearing” that would lead to his expulsion from Budapest. When these memories returned to him, at these moments, they would “trouble him” because they would bring to mind the relationships between himself, Henirtte, Blanka, and Irén. They would recall the tragedies, the sorrow, the pain. Yet, he did not recall the play in full. He recalled parts of it, namely the way Henriette looked at him and how Blanka acted.

Lillian Smith sums up the ways we remember the past and our experiences in her 1954 memoir The Journey. There, she discusses our own recollections and the reality of what happened in relation to painting and photography. She writes, “The memory has so little talent for photography. It likes to paint pictures. Experience is not laid away in it like a snapshot to be withdrawn at will but is returned to us as a portrait painted over in our psychic colors, its form and pattern structures on that of our life.” Bálint’s memories are not facts or reality, in regard to what actually happened. But, they are his reality, how he experienced them. The same goes for Henriette, her parents, and the soldier. Each character reflects on the past and remembers events in their own way. They paint the picture, fill in the frame.

These discussions of memory and death are what keep me coming back to Katalin Street. It is a novel that examines the ways we think about ourselves and how our memories impact us and our actions. As well, it is a novel that deals with the uncertainty of death and works to explore the ways that our memoires serve as a bridge between this world and “that place” that Henriette inhabits after her murder. There is so much more in Katalin Street, but these are the things that keep bringing me back to it, that keep me engaged.

What are your thoughts? As always, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.