 | Świat Książki
Warsaw 2005
125 x 95
232 pages
hardcover
ISBN 83-247-0142-7
Translation rights: Bertelsmann Media |
|
Marek NowakowskiNecropolis
About the author
Excerpt
This book can be read in two ways. The first, as the author intended, involves plunging into a nostalgic account of literary and social life in post-war Poland in the period from 1956 to 1989.
Thanks to Nowakowski’s incredible memory we get to know dozens of people – writers, painters, graphic designers and editors – who either produced or contributed to producing literature. Nowakowski’s idea involves sorting the large crowd of characters who flood his pages according to the places where they used to meet. And so he takes us on a tour of Warsaw as it used to be, dropping in at restaurants, hotels and editorial offices to meet the people there. Each of the characters is established in a particular place and is given the floor for a while. Short scenes recollect conversations, the names of various alcoholic drinks, café-bars and their atmosphere. Yet each of these memories carries a nostalgic, obituary-style summing up: “The old Hotel Bristol is no longer there”; “the Caracas café ceased to exist, and the aroma of roast coffee has evaporated, never to return”; or “Those people are no longer alive. Not a single one.”
Thus this is one of Nowakowski’s saddest books. As he intended, the sadness is meant to arise from the simple observation that once upon a time literary Warsaw was buzzing with life, but now, since all those people have died and all those cafés have gone, the city has changed into a necropolis.
However, we could also read it in exactly the opposite light, and then a different graveyard story appears before our eyes, not about the present day, but about the past. From the narrative the ghastly reality of Poland’s cadaverous literary life emerges: in the 1960s and 70s the writers meet in café-bars and restaurants, have heated arguments, drink vodka, move to another bar, have more heated arguments, drink more vodka… They are neither alive nor dead. Their semi-corpselike state arises from the fact that they seek proof of their own vitality in a semblance of literary life, through meetings in cafés, through the material success offered by the state in exchange for literary servility, and through the occasional short story printed in a literary journal read by their own colleagues at the café. It’s a closed circle of zombies taking part in the slow dance of literary life that the communist state provided for its writers, and that they made up for themselves. The only ones to escape from this graveyard routine were the ones who sought confirmation of their vitality in their work.
Przemysław Czapliński
Back |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
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 »
|
|
|
|
