This new book by Sławomir Shuty, whose collection of short stories Sugar Level Normal (2002) was well received by the critics, is like a well constructed ethnographical study of the language and mentality of the Firm’s employees. In this case the Firm is “the banking sector”, a department at the Hamburger Bank. Shuty manages to present, in a metaphorical way, the modern-day situation of the young Pole caught in the cogs of capitalist enterprise. Here we find routine chats at work, a pitifully monstrous home life, office talk, street talk and Internet chat room talk; here, God help us, we have a world of ideas and values that fill the heads and feed the thoughts of a generation that’s been tossed onto the rubbish heap of the supermarket, and sent out to face the labour exchange, the rat race, the carousel of promotions and professional training, cynicism and hypocrisy in retail and wholesale quantities, the banality and futility of life’s comings and goings all in great variety. The whole story is told with predatory humour and it’s cleverly pointed as it builds up an image of the trap, the dehumanisation process that was described to us by the sociologists of a bygone era, who wrote about inhuman labour and the prefabricated “service people” of post-capitalist technology. The brutalised language carves out an apocalyptic chasm between life’s façade and the underground world of the incapacitated and the humiliated, between officialdom and the desperation of “the accursed people of the earth”, whose endless frustration, hopelessness, cynicism and hatred cannot find any other outlet. This book has the potential of being a manifesto for its generation.
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 »
