 | Wydawnictwo W.A.B
Warszawa 2005
125 x 195
232 strony
ISBN 83-7414-103-4
Translation rights: W.A.B |
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Wojciech KuczokConfected Stories
About the author
Excerpt
As soon as his first book of short stories appeared in 1999 Wojciech Kuczok enjoyed a very warm reception from both readers and critics, as confirmed by a nomination for the NIKE Literary Award, among other prizes. But within the critical response to Kuczok’s stories there were clearly some expectations, directly expressed in Kinga Dunin’s article, "Why Wojciech Kuczok Should Write a Novel". These expectations arose from an intuitive sense that the stories were an attempt to find, firstly, a subject that would be the author’s own, and secondly a suitable language to express it in. And indeed, the novel Muck, which won several prizes, including Polityka newspaper’s “Passport” and the NIKE award, proved that Kuczok had come up with his own subject (a family hell) and style – slightly grotesque, flirting with realism, but aesthetically not without meaning – full of elegant constructions, consciously interrupted now and then by Silesian dialect and street talk. So if Muck marked the crowning point of Kuczok’s writing to date, the short pieces retold in Confected Stories are a perfect illustration of the path he took towards writing his first novel. Above all they remind us of the roots of his writing, which are in the work of Witold Gombrowicz and the influence of the avant garde fiction of the 1970s and 1980s. Gombrowicz has a presence in these stories, as patron for instance of Kuczok’s fondness for putting his own heroes into situations that unleash extreme emotions as well as some truly atavistic responses. They often give rise to Gombrowicz-style absurdity too, as events give reality the slip and start leaning towards irony (until you want to cry… through your tears). But we also find echoes of Gombrowicz in Kuczok’s work when we realise that, paradoxically, these stories are very carefully composed and are an example of what Krzysztof Uniłowski once defined as “studio” fiction. However, a description of Kuczok’s short stories would not be complete without mentioning his other patron. Above all, we can perceive the avant garde influence in the aesthetic experiment he makes and in his use of multiple aspects of spoken language – Silesian dialect, the language of the lower social orders, and finally youth slang. This diversity allows us to read Confected Stories not just as a vivisection of the pitfalls of life, but also as a clash of tongues, a polyphony of speech, the multi-faceted nature of our longing to communicate.
Igor Stokfiszewski
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