 | Świat Książki
Warszawa 2006
125 x 195
272 pages
hardcover
ISBN 83-7391-524-9
Translation rights: Bertelsmann Media |
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Edward RedlińskiTelephrenia
About the author
Excerpt
Telephrenia could be described as a novel about being addicted to films, television, newspapers, the Internet, advertising and other media wrecking the mind and soul of modern man. However, the author links this wide-ranging issue with an illness (as implied by the title) and has invented an individual case, where a sick man tells the story of his sick world. The novel’s narrator and main character has strayed from the straight and narrow. He is a 55-year-old engineer from Warsaw who, plagued by illness, sees addiction everywhere: he convinces his son he’s addicted to television and the Internet, and his daughter that she’s hooked on extreme sports. In the 1970s he himself was a cinema addict, later he spent over ten hours a day watching TV, then finally gave up TV but became an avid reader of all the tabloids and colour magazines issued in Poland. He easily got into that, because after the decline of the construction plant where he worked for many years he took a job as a salesman at a newspaper kiosk. Extensive flashbacks that tell the engineer’s life story are built into the action of the novel, which takes place from mid February to mid April 2005. In this period the hero falls hopelessly in love with a pharmacy employee, who he thinks is the image of Catherine Deneuve, goes to meetings where “Suicides Anonymous”, “Meteoropaths Anonymous” and other alleged addicts are treated, but above all, accompanied by his son Karol, he takes part – as a member of the viewing public, of course – in the huge media circus surrounding the final days, death and funeral of Pope John Paul II. Quite sincerely and disinterestedly he wants to join in with the national mourning, but fails to do so, and the novel ends with a ludicrous finale.
Dariusz Nowacki
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