 | słowo/obraz terytoria
Gdańsk 2005
141 x 212
180 pages
hardcover
ISBN 83-7453-620-9
Translation rights: słowo/obraz terytoria |
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Aleksander JurewiczAshes and Wind
About the author
There are happy writers and there are sad writers; Aleksander Jurewicz is one of the latter. For fans of sad literature his latest book is a real treat, and for fans of beautiful writing too, because it consists of whole sentences and paragraphs of extreme beauty. Jurewicz is one of the best stylists of the old school writing in Poland today, and so he is a writer for whom every single word has an incredible, heartening force simply because it stands in the right place. In terms of form, Ashes and Wind is a continuation of Life and Lyrics, a collection of articles written from month to month, though here a different tone prevails; while that was a collection of memoirs and impressions, this book obsessively explores a few themes regarded as ultimate and expressed in a paradoxical way: love as a form of solitude, displacement as a form of settling in, and death as a form of being reconciled with life. Jurewicz acquaints us with the circumstances that gave rise to his earlier works, takes stock of his own life to date, and holds a dialogue with the living and the dead; he is touchingly sincere, while also creating some artistic mythology about himself. Here we are given a set of key events from the past (his departure from his native Belarus, the death of his father, his youthful rebellion and how he calmed down upon finding his “own voice”), which overlap, much in the manner of a novel, with some contemporary themes: a broken affair, a provincial Andy Warhol who collects the world’s refuse in his flat, an old village handyman who after losing his wife decides never to get out of bed again, and so on. Each character is introduced with a vigour that to some extent belies the “farewell” character of the whole book. There are wayfaring writers and settled writers, and perhaps Jurewicz would be happiest never leaving his own “caretaker’s lodge”, as he calls it, never even going beyond the land of his childhood, where he feels at his best; unfortunately, life has tossed him here and there, resulting in this refined and melancholy prose.
Adam Wiedemann
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