The Kanizsa Cold Storage House

It is a Sisyphean task to piece together the past of a city using archaeological excavations, archival materials, birth certificate extracts, private letters, and marginal notes written on the family Bible or other books. It is an equally enormous undertaking to go down into the vault of our own past, by evoking our memories, family legends, old spatial experiences, smells, sounds, muscle memories. To show the shopkeeper on the street, a recalcitrant family member, a book stall, a synagogue, the world of schools, and many other unique things that, if anyone else recognizes them, will immediately become commonplace. The Cold House in Kanizsa is the story of the second-born son of a poor family. But let's not think that he will become a king or a wealthy tycoon. To use Péter Esterházy's words, the main character is "a commoner", a simple person - and that is precisely what is exciting about him: he could be any of us. Perhaps only his heightened sensitivity and literary knowledge distinguish him from the worker next door. But he does not hold his nose high, one of the Kanizsa people. Because the book is set in Nagykanizsa, after the Second World War. Many will recognize the different parts of the city, even if there are some that we could only find on old maps or in the memories of very old people. The past is not a puzzle, you can never put all its pieces together. The more we know, the better we see the gaps. No literary work is a puzzle. Lajos V. Mohai works on the intensity of the subjective image. Let that snake of memory coil itself. His lines, with their unmistakable melancholy, are themselves time capsules that can be opened in several directions.