The Latest Stories is three short stories about a grandmother, mother and granddaughter. The narratives add up to a novel, but the three tales do not create a full picture. This is no typical family story, no warm tale about close relationships. It is rather an anti-saga, a tale about torn family ties, lost relations, and the impossibility of finding oneself in the links of the family chain. The three female protagonists, Praskowia, Ida and Maja, lack not only deep ties, but also common sympathy. If something is binding them together it is a feeling of duty, alienation and guilt. The Latest Stories tries to answer the question of how intolerable repetitive patterns get formed. First, a woman seeks emotional fulfillment in a relationship with someone else. Then comes the feeling of entrapment. The protagonists, starving for a feeling of acceptance and some recognition of their individuality, set out on the road, casting off their husbands, parents and loved ones, and exchanging their settled lives for nomadic wanderings. Each of the three protagonists lives farther away from her unattainable “good place,” in other words, home: the eldest, Praskowia, was removed from her small homeland during World War Two; her daughter, Ida, is a tour guide who goes around five countries in Europe; Ida’s daughter, Maja, travels about the whole world assembling travel guidebooks. Praskowia was a prisoner of marriage, Ida and Maja are free. And yet they can find no joy in their lives. Is the “male world” to blame? To some degree, yes… It is not by accident that men are absent from these tales: They have left badly-structured realities and broken relationships, and departed. They have left suffering behind them. But it doesn’t seem as though Olga Tokarczuk has written a “gender” novel. It is rather about the unconquerable alienation of existence, of general non-adaptability to life, of the cost of delusions, and about how one can achieve fulfillment in life. This is more than disillusionment with the male world, it is also disillusionment with family relationships. A child, though it be “of woman born,” need not maintain faith in that woman. A person, though she may be able to imagine an ideal life, may also be entirely unsuited for it… It would be hard to find a book as sad and hypnotic in the Polish literature of the past decade.
There are more than 31,000 publishers registered in Poland. However, the market is highly concentrated. The 300 largest publishing firms still hold almost 98 per cent of it. More »
