About the authorExcerptThis is Magdalena Tulli’s most mature novel, born from the urgency of the cruel question: why does one write? (Lidia Burska, Res Publica Nowa)
Magdalena Tulli is one of the leading Polish writers of the middle generation. When her debut novel, Dreams and Stones, appeared, she was acclaimed as an author with great potential. The critics were thrilled by her rich imagination, lively language and masterful command of the writer’s art, and compared her with Bruno Schulz, Italo Calvino, Georges Perec and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
In her new novel, Modes, the narrator struggles to tell a banal tale of marital infidelity, but the book is a really a debate on the opacity of the world; in it the story told is of truth’s last resort, while at the same time being an illusion, because the ”modes” of the title have the real causative power. ”Modes” are the devices of language that work like railway points, unexpectedly diverting the flow of the story, sending it off on another track. The tale of Irena Feuchtmeier’s betrayal of her husband, ”an expert on sea transport”, and her affair with a circus acrobat, is echoed in the reported story of the affair between a black trumpeter, John Maybe, and the wife of a man called Fochtmajer, who owns the ”Polish Word” printing firm and is killed by the Germans while trying to escape in September 1939. The narrator himself is wounded by a bullet fired by a Wehrmacht officer. There are other characters in the background, too, one of whom brings in the theme of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans; there are also suggestions that we should be reading Tulli’s novel as a would-be, unwritten romance and as a story about the agonies of the twentieth century. The novel is written with perverse, melancholy humour: the feeling of loss – the loss of sense, the loss of someone’s presence, the loss of the truth about our life – can never be satisfied.
There are more than 31,000 publishers registered in Poland. However, the market is highly concentrated. The 300 largest publishing firms still hold almost 98 per cent of it. More »
