Hanna Krall

A Quiet Sunday Afternoon

About the author

Excerpt

This book includes selected newspaper features from the 1970s, originally published in the weekly press. However, three successive attempts to publish these articles in book form came up against the resistance of both official and unofficial, editorial censorship. In 1976, a collection of Hanna Krall’s articles, The good fortune of Marianna Głaz, which was ready and waiting for printing at the Iskra publishing house was destroyed. And although her next book, Six shades of white, did reach publication in 1978, it was severely abridged. She engaged the publisher Wydawnictwo Literackie to publish her next selection of articles, Hay fever, in 1980. It was printed this time, but this book, too, never saw the light of day because the entire print-run was pulped. The manuscript of her next book, Innocence for the rest of the day, was placed with the publisher Czytelnik, but was returned to her two years later without any explanation. Trouble standing up, a selection of articles from her unpublished books, was finally published in 1988 by the underground publisher Wydawnictwo Pokolenie. Two years later the same book appeared officially, along with a novel entitled Windows, which was previously published by émigré publisher Aneks in London. A quiet Sunday afternoon is a new selection of texts from these books. Yet none of them is repeated and this volume makes up a new, integral whole. Hanna Krall is a first-rate reporter, and her articles are about the fortunes of real people living in real times, but at the same time they have a universal nature, which can be seen even more clearly now as we read them in another reality, in another age. She is a master at rendering the language of an era that has now disappeared into the past. She only has to summon up a conversation she heard then, an object or a landscape she saw for that reality to flare into view, laden with unexpected meanings. Surviving as evidence of their times, Hanna Krall’s articles are also outstanding works of literature.

- RK