Janusz Głowacki

The Last Super

About the author

Excerpt

The artistic prototype of Janusz Glowacki's latest novel, Ostatni ciec, is the film Citizen Kane by Orson Welles. Glowacki's protagonist is John Jefferson Caine, whose name is pronounced like the name of Welles's hero. Just as in Welles, Caine is a media mogul. The action of Glowacki's book is set almost a century later, so Caine can manipulate public opinion in a far more refined manner by staging events which his TV channels then broadcast. Caine amassed an enormous fortune as a fashion designer; he became the most famous creator of cultural symbols and images. But his greatest success was the creation of a new design of men's pants. Welles's reporter is replaced by Kuba, the last super, a Pole from Greenpoint. He is a classic Glowacki character, and he guides the reader through Caine's mad world. Citizen Kane, framed by the death of its hero, is the story of one life. The beginning of The Last Super is similar but its ending is different. The night at a Broadway restaurant, where the author listens to Kuba's story, changes into a natural disaster. We never know if this is a hurricane, an earthquake, the apocalypse or just the end of the western civilization. Glowacki's cruel symbolism shows Caine's pants to be the dream of the masses. Buying them may bring luck: in each package there is a lottery ticket. The main prize is the right to permanent residency in America and the two-hundred-thousand-dollar job of a janitor in Caine's castle. Fate grants this consumerist luck to Kuba. It would be wrong, however, to reduce The Last Super to a set of bitter attacks against the vulgarity of omnipresent commercialisation, as the book shows how money has taken possession of man's spirituality in the modern world, a region where art and culture had resided until now. It talks about the insatiable caste, ever desirous of fame and riches, created by the ubiquitous mass media, about the products of that caste, the consumption of which requires no effort, about new mechanisms forming patterns of human behavior and images accessible to everybody and available in every drugstore or supermarket.

                                                                                       Henryk Dasko