 | Prószyński i S-ka
Warszawa 2005
146 x 208
152 pages
hardcover
ISBN 83-7337-952-5
Translation rights: Prószyński i S-ka |
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Marek NowakowskiStigmatics
About the author
Excerpt
The urge to expose the truth is the driving force behind Nowakowski’s prose. Stigmatics is his latest collection of portraits of Poles faced with changes to the system that have complicated their everyday lives. But this time Nowakowski’s writing is less concerned with the main beneficiaries of those changes, and more with those who have lost out, who have been impoverished or pushed onto the margins of society. They are outcasts from the new cash culture who don’t know how to adapt to the rules of the “greedy struggle” for money, or how to face up to the demands of the new morality either. Paradoxically, some of them are people who were perfectly able to “live it up”, as they put it themselves, under Hitler and Stalin or in the Gierek era, the nouveaux riches, wheeler-dealers, former market gardeners and other representatives of so-called private initiative who once had the right connections and made clever use of communist Poland’s legal and tax-system loopholes. Now, not adapted to the new requirements, living on pensions and memories of the past, these regulars in bars where, as at “Maggie’s”, the friendly owner lets them take advantage of cheaper liquor bought in the shop next door, they have been driven out of the market game by new finaglers, “aggressive, overfed swine” from the political mafia orders, of whom they have the worst possible opinion.
Among these losers and outcasts there are also some poets (presented with a tear in the eye in the story The Former Poets and the Muse), who enjoyed fame and fortune of a kind in communist Poland, as well as adoring girls from the provinces, but who are now abandoned, left to the mercy of patrons of dubious reputation and potential sponsors with fat wallets seduced during some sort of banqueting. There are also some former dignitaries, often from intelligentsia origins, who belonged to the fine ideological past of the wartime and just after, including Polish Socialist Party members; half-heartedly and against their own interests they let themselves be harnessed to the communist retinue, and then, having closed their eyes to the farce of Polish politics as it fawned on their patrons to the east, let themselves go completely to the dogs, and are now grieving over the ever more apparent failure of their lives.
Nowakowski’s literary diagnosis of the times we live in seems to aptly complement and justify the image of life in modern Poland that can seriously upset or shock us if we listen regularly to the Polish media’s daily news bulletins.
Mieczysław Orski
Nowe Książki, 7/2005
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