 | Wydawnictwo Literackie
Cracow 2006
123x197
312 pages
hardcover
ISBN 83-08-03861-1
Translation rights: Wydawnictwo Literackie |
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Janusz AndermanThe Whole Time
Excerpt
There aren’t enough words to describe Anderman’s novel. It is superb, funny, daring, insolent, iconoclastic and perplexing. It will cause a commotion in Polish literature and once translated into the languages of the neighbouring countries it will re-open the debate on the independence of literature in the communist era and in the age of democracy.
Anderman tells the story of a con man who becomes an opposition writer. In the mid 1970s he publishes a book of verse in the genre known as concrete poetry – and this is his only genuine piece of writing. A few years later he steals a novel written by a patient in a mental hospital who has died, publishes it independently outside the censorship and wins fame as an opposition writer; later yet, while living with a woman who works for the state radio, he pinches the texts of her broadcasts, rewrites them and sends them abroad under his own name, thus becoming a representative of Polish independent literature for émigré Poles and the foreign public. After 1989, and thus in the era of freedom and democracy, he writes for the popular press, compiling texts from foreign newspapers, mixing them up and publishing them under his own name. He also earns a living by writing campaign material for various – often opposing – political parties.
So is this just the story of a cheat, a plagiarist and rogue? Yes and no. Yes, because the main character is undoubtedly a shady type, and nothing will change that. No, because if we were to end its description there, we would miss the crucial issue – the role of literature in public life over the past twenty-five years. In a nutshell, Anderman tells us that public myths about literature have wiped out originality. First, when society was battling against the regime, we expected literature to repeat the great words of humanity, requiring it to be grandiloquent rather than original. In the democratic era on the other hand we have pushed the writer into the role of expert at mixing cultures in his texts – like a juggler of familiar quotations, a compiler of golden thoughts and popular plots. Once a piece of literature was supposed to be copied from national allegories, and now it has become a mixture of well-known works.
Przemysław Czapliński
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