 | | Świat Książki
Warsaw 2004
© Jerzy Pilch
130 x 250
352 pages
hardback
ISBN 83-7391-370-X
rights available |
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Jerzy PilchCity of Woes
About the author
Excerpt
One hot day in the summer of 2000 a young man called Patryk Wojewoda, who reckons he “can’t cope with the world”, discovers that he possesses the gift of hearing PINs – the personal identity numbers other people tap into automatic telling machines. He’s a law student. He lives in Warsaw – city of a thousand ATMs and beautiful women. One of them, Konstancja Wybryk (literally “Constance Frolic”) is his current girlfriend. Has Patryk already won?
The opening of Jerzy Pilch’s novel heralds a romantic thriller about an undeserved victory, carried off at the very start, in life’s race for money and love. Regardless of the surprising and unexpected way the story continues, what matters is that by equipping his hero with what one might call a purely capitalist gift, the author is posing the serious question: is it possible to triumph in the modern world? Is it possible to “cope with the world” these days?
The answer is no, it’s not. The money goes round in a mysterious cycle of over indulgence and crime, men and women team up in ill-matched couples, and the metropolis, though full of attractions, draws its inhabitants into an unreal life that is reflected in the produce of the media. The city – this particular one, but any other in Europe too – is a city of woes: the more suggestive, the less real it is, the more tempting, the more powerfully deceptive it becomes.
At the opposite extreme from the post-modern city in Pilch’s novel is the distant province – the small town of Granatowe Góry where Patryk was born. In the great big world political systems change, governments fall and a new map of Europe comes into being, but there, in Granatowe Góry, life continues in the same old way: there’s one shop, one priest, and one circle of acquaintances; the women take care of the home and the men hold long conversations over bottles of vodka, the young people leave and the old people die. Thus Pilch shows that there are two worlds nowadays: the small town, where everything is real, but nothing ever changes, and the big city, where everything keeps changing, but nothing is real. Life in the former is absurd, and in the latter it’s awful. In the former there’s nothing to fight for, and in the latter you should never start the fight or you’ll be condemned to a life among semblances of reality.
As it’s impossible to “cope with the modern world”, then maybe, as the end of the novel suggests, there’s hope in literature that’s what allows us to live in between both worlds with getting involved in either, and that’s the key to the art of walking down the post-modern highway.
Przemysław Czapliński
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