Andrzej Stasiuk

Fado

Excerpt

Does Andrzej Stasiuk travel; does he set off on expeditions? In my opinion, it is rather that he haunts his favourite corners of his beloved Central Europe, reaching places that at first glance seem uninteresting, where "normal” tourists don’t stop for even a moment. And then he describes them if only because "nobody else will”. Fado constitutes a continuation of the prose project on roads and wilderness that Stasiuk carried out with such virtuosity in Jadąc do Babadag (Travelling to Babadag) (winner of last year's prestigious NIKE award); however the present book sets out to be more impressionist and fragmentary. The author of Dukla again sends in reports from expeditions to his favourite stamping grounds, writing about among other things Albania, Rumania, Montenegro and Slovakia. To these, Stasiuk adds his impressions of Polish villages and towns, which he tours indefatigably, prodded by his wanderlust, his need to keep moving, but also probably the fear that something might escape him, disappear, disintegrate before it becomes indelibly recorded in his memory. Fado also contains descriptions of his mental trips, first and foremost his trips in time. Stasiuk reminisces about writers who in their time were important to him (for example Danilo Kiša) and returns to memories from his childhood, to the events that shaped him as a writer and a man. So is this a clearance sale of reminiscences? Not totally, because the author of Opowieści galicyjskie (Galician tales), has this ability to take seemingly banal and ordinary brief observations and descriptions of events, such as are within the abilities of the majority of us, and weave from them a universal story about the fate of our part of Europe and the people living here, supposedly Europeans, but - as Stasiuk repeatedly reminds us - different from those living in the west. Robert Ostaszewski