 | W.A.B
Warsaw 2005
125 x 195
216 pages
hardcover
ISBN 83-7414-151-4
Translations rights: W.A.B
Rights sold to: USA (Archipelago Books) |
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Magdalena TulliFlaw
About the author
Excerpt
The residents of the houses on a big-city square seem very familiar to us. The maid with her dreams, the notary who employs her, the policeman who was once wounded on the front, the student who goes in for political rows and drunken brawls and other characters in Flaw are playing roles that at first sight seem as standard as a tailor’s templates. They belong to a past era, though not a distant one – symbolised here by a stock market crash, a local coup or a crowd of unwelcome refugees. These snapshots of people suffering oppression, expelled from their familiar surroundings into an alien world, recall a sort of prototype for some twentieth-century experiences. However, not for the first time in Tulli’s work, the characters and events depicted here only seem on the surface to be a repeatable stereotype. Vivid, empathetic description gives them back their uniqueness. At the same time, someone who appears to be the narrator of this “little tale” is by no means omnipotent as its creator. He has to fight for a better fortune for the characters he has summoned into being. He struggles with the bungling that has taken over behind the scenes in this none too realistic square, and wrestles with the negligence that is ruining people’s lives there. With her typical wealth of language and musical sense of development and polyphonic form, Magdalena Tulli takes the story to a dramatic climax, and then to a surprising conclusion. Like Moving Parts, Flaw could perhaps be called idiosyncratic “inexhaustible literature”. The feeling that the narrator has too limited a power over the represented world seems here to be accompanied by an awareness that there is an ever growing number of tales about human existence demanding description and sympathy.
Jakub Ekier
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