Kuczok is a future star of the literary world (Henryk Bereza, in the literary journal Twórczość)
One of Wojciech Kuczok’s earlier collections of short stories, Tales Heard (1999), was nominated for Poland’s prestigious NIKE prize. His new novel, Muck (2003), is the quasi-autobiographical story of the hero’s nightmare of a childhood marked by humiliations (”Old K.” reached with sadistic relish for his riding crop as a tool for fatherly instruction). Kuczok successfully adds his name to the tradition of literature that exorcises the demons of childhood. He paints a remarkable portrait of his father, ”old K.”, a neurasthenic member of the intelligentsia, the typical ”authoritarian character”. Here we also have some superb sketches of family life, satirical and lyrical portraits of the household members, and some superb scenes from life in Silesia (his family chronicle goes back as far as the pre-war era). The ending of the book, the catastrophic collapse of the family home as it sinks into the muck of the title (because of a sewage system accident and ground subsidence, which happens quite often in areas where coal mines are right next to the city) is like the ending of The Fall of the House of Usher, the famous story by Edgar Allan Poe, a classic mystery tale. But the literary quality of this prose is also another pointer to dissuade you from reading the novel as naturalistic or biographical. ”I spent my whole life” – says the narrator – ”running away from that house, only to end up being its ruin.” ”Once I was there, now I no longer am” – the final sentence sounds like an old Latin inscription on a tombstone. This novel tells the story of an adventure that is shared by everyone, because everyone has his or her own idyllic memories while also carrying the scars of a family past.
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