This writer, technically still a young girl, possesses an unheard-of literary maturity and such a command of the Polish language, such a gift for unstitching, for scrutinising, for knocking the brains out of language and creating from those brains a language of her own, at times macabre and far-fetched, always poetic in its own way, that the possibilities for her future development are boundless. (Jerzy Pilch)
The first book from this fledgling novelist is in the form of a monologue by its protagonist, Silny. He and the other characters, Magda, Angela, Arletta, Natasha, Casper, and Lefty — all teenagers in a small Polish city in a time of rabid capitalism — are already slated for a life on the dole. Their values, ideas, and beliefs about the world, rendered in hip commonplaces gleaned from television and glossy magazines and radical jargon from the internet, are as funny as they are disturbing. Their speech with all its trashy inflections reverberates like a carnival of lumpen-nihilists. The story takes place on the day before and the day of a popular celebration: ”Day Without Russkies” (the celebration is a kind of declaration of ‘war’: the ‘Russki’ traders who have come to the city are competition for its inhabitants, especially for the local boss and politician Zdzisław Sztorm, who is both the proprietor of a Polish gravel plant and a wholesaler of Russian ‘siding’, i.e. construction panelling). Like a kind of Polish Trainspotting, Masłowska’s novel (which in many ways resembles a drug-induced vision) is a social satire, with elements of the grotesque and Grand Guignol.
Time and again Masłowska reminds us that literature, this make-believe world, has to exist because otherwise real life might not be worth living.
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 »
