 | Wydawnictwo Tytuł
Gdańsk 2005
135×201
192 pages
hardcover
ISBN 83-89859-00-9
Translation rights: Stefan Chwin/Wydawnictwo Tytuł |
|
Stefan ChwinThe President’s Wife
About the author
Excerpt
The President’s Wife is a novel in the political fiction genre in which a patient at a mental hospital in Florida writes down the story of the Polish president’s wife. This patient is an army interpreter of Polish descent who encountered Krystyna (as the First Lady is called) during questioning conducted by American intelligence agents following her arrest in Warsaw as a dangerous terrorist and her deportation to a secret base in the USA. Earlier on she ran away from her husband when he was caught having an affair with an intern, joined an unidentified sect and generally participated in some bizarre events worthy of a thriller or an adventure story. The plot of this novel is just a pretext – the form it takes is not important, but the content is, because it is has been sourced from dozens of political scandals that have shaken Poland, Europe and the world in the past five years or so. Chwin is most eager to recall some notorious American issues, so here we have the war against Islamic terrorism, especially against Al-Qaida, the Monica Lewinsky affair, armed intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, and above all the scandal involving the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. However, The President’s Wife is not a topical novel of the moment or a journalistic book. Essentially, as we read in the fictional preface, it’s about providing “evidence of the more general anxieties, obsessions and frustrations of our times, magnified in the crooked mirror of mental illness”. Stefan Chwin has made some serious modifications to the set conventions for the genre of political fiction, enriching it with some philosophical content and giving a voice to the one thing he probably cares about the most – the moral debate.
Dariusz Nowacki
Back |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
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 »
|
|
|
|
