Excerpt
Anyone who knows the extremely funny film The Life of Brian made by the Monty Python team or who has read Joseph Heller’s excellent novel God Knows, just about knows it all already. Roman Praszyński has put together an absorbing and subversive apocryphal tale in which he parodies themes taken from the Bible and the Torah, combining Old Testament tales with episodes from the Koran and the Arabian Nights. It’s a real hotchpotch, very funny in places. The main characters in this story are Mea and Lea, the heroines of the title, who despite escaping from the burning ruins of Sodom had nothing but misfortunes. You could say the real Sodom was still ahead of them, featuring violence, rape, some hair-raising scenes and the slyly begotten, unwanted children that they brought into the world. Praszyński not only piles on the jokes and concocts some convoluted adventures, but also tries to present a model of the fate of womankind. The feminist perspective is the only serious aspect of the novel otherwise it is sheer fun and amusement.
Dariusz Nowacki
Roman Praszyński was born in 1965 and is known for his scandalous writing. His youthful novels, anti-clerical, provocative and full of daring social comment, caught the attention of the reading public in the first half of the 1990s. For several years he was silent, but now he is back with his new novel, Lot’s Daughters.
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