"Tastes and Touches" is a collection of twenty-two stories of great literary merit. In each story the main character is a woman, usually a mature one, with some more or less painful experiences behind her. There is an impressive cast of characters: as well as ordinary women who live everyday lives, housewives or girls-next-door, there are also intellectuals, prostitutes and alcoholics. Although several of the female characters (such as Anna and Małgorzata) come and go in various stories, the book has no distinct central plot or issue. The heroines are not just Polish; some of the stories are set in the Balkans (Bosnia and Croatia) or western Europe (Austria, Germany and Holland). The specific time and place are not particularly important, nor is the heroines’ social origin significant, and the environment they belong to matters even less. Iwasiów focuses on drawing psychological portraits of her characters, aiming to describe what is special and different about female experience, a particular kind of sensitivity and awareness. What matters most here are the nuances, the small, sensory details, as the book’s title partly suggests – because women’s experience, Iwasiów implies, is made up of lots of seemingly trivial, ephemeral impressions, like “tastes and touches”. Another virtue of this book is that she tries to reinvent erotic language, or rather, on the basis of Polish literary tradition, to establish a new code for talking about sensual love (with emphasis on a lesbian theme).
Dariusz Nowacki
Inga Iwasiów (born 1963) is a poet and writer, scholar of literature and professor at Szczecin University. She has published several essays on the history of literature and literary criticism, a collection of short stories called The City – Me – The City (1998) and a volume of poetry entitled Love (2001). Tastes and Touches (2006) is her second work of fiction.
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