Marzena Broda

Luka

About the Author

Excerpt

This book reminds me of something; dense with metaphors, it’s the narrative of a man who in a state of almost dream-like elation pours out his recollections, fears, desires and stories about a woman who came along and opened up paradise and Pandora’s box for him all at once. One day Bernard, an American expert on Russian literature, sees Luka and decides to invite her to dinner. Her acceptance opens the story of the strange relationship between this man and this married woman that can never be gratified in a life together, but is everything Bernard has been waiting for “from the moment of birth”. The blunt, expressive poetry of pain, often moving into a fluent account of the heights of passion, interrupted by memories of the hero’s childhood and youth, builds an absorbing tale, whose mysterious conclusion will leave fans of happy endings feeling unsatisfied, but will free Luka of any accusations of sentimentality.Now I know – somewhere in the background there’s an echo of Roland Barthes and his Fragments from a Lover’s Discourse, and not for the first time in Polish literature of the past few years. Many critics have pointed out the French roots in Marek Bieńczyk’s Terminal – a similarly dense narrative, as much a romantic novel as a philosophical treatise about the relationship between the top surface and the bottom layer of a piece of literature. Marzena Broda does not set herself such aims. Luka is above all a tribute to the emotions that change people’s lives; the book is about the mystery of loneliness, which is the hero’s medium, and love, which paradoxically is sometimes its mirror image. Creating a world that is stretched between pain and rapture, Broda explores areas of our follies that we usually try to ignore.By making her main character a man, Broda breaks down the stereotypes that ascribes emotional behaviour to women and give “the stronger sex” dominion over reason. This may be the most interesting theme in the book, and also distinguishes Luka from Terminal. Although Bieńczyk may not have tried to reflect the emotions that were disturbing his narrator and main character in one, his male vision focuses on the philosophical dimension, while Marzena Broda has written a romantic novel that takes away the man’s power to dominate not only the woman he loves, but also himself, and ultimately the story within which he tries to encapsulate his life with Luka. An extremely intelligent and sensitive man, Bernard cannot, doesn’t want and doesn’t have to pretend he is capable of overcoming his pain or longing. Nor do we, gentlemen.