 | Bonobo
Warszawa 2004
© Piotr Kofta
120x190
239 pages
paperback
ISBN 89-9203-887-8 |
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Piotr KoftaFine Evenings
Excerpt
Fine Evenings is a set of contemporary stories, full of warm, ironical humour, about love, loneliness and lack of fulfilment. Cigarettes smoked while waiting for better times to come along, chance conversations that can no longer change anything, running away from yourself, thinking back on lost opportunities and the coils of inevitable necessity none of it has to sound tragic or exalted, because it happens to everyone, not just the chosen few. Every one of us wanders to his own end of the world and seeks a moment of respite at the close of day. In the evenings reality loses its sharp edges. Things that seem important lose some of their gravity. Things we give pace and purpose recede into the background. Sorrow becomes comical, yearning seems futile and passion merely temporary. In exchange there’s room for melancholy and a touch of satire. In the evenings it’s easier to come to terms with the world, though painfully enough, the world doesn’t gain any value because of this it just goes on being the same.
The main population of Fine Evenings, people who evoke the author’s greatest sympathy, are those who can’t find a place for themselves in today’s reality convinced it’s not them, but the world that’s gone mad the depressives, the lonely, people who epitomise impracticality, or are over-sensitive.The longer story, “Night shift”, should immediately be made into a film. It is the literary diary of an insomniac intellectual who delivers pizzas to flats at night and sees a whole human menagerie: unhappy lovers, neglected women, petty crooks and common yobs. There’s a beautiful romantic story about a Slovak pub where each of the regulars identifies with one of the stars of Real Madrid, and the unlucky exhibitionist who appears in two stories is a masterpiece. Not a single one of these sixteen stories is weak. I can truly say that Kofta has passed all the tests with flying colours and deserves to be called a writer.
Marek Mikos
Piotr Kofta (b. 1973) sociologist by training, teaches at a college and does independent social research. His work has been published on the Internet under the pseudonym “Mr Szpicer”. Fine Evenings is his first book.
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