"The Valley of Joy" is a fast-moving adventure that contains elements of fantasy literature but is simultaneously a dignified moral-philosophical discourse. The story spans a large part of the twentieth century (from the 1930s to the 1970s) and is set in cities in Germany (Munich and Berlin), Poland (Gdansk and Warsaw) and Russia (Stalingrad and Moscow). It tells the tale of Eryk Stamelmann, a ‘face sculptor’, a talented make-up artist and pioneer of plastic surgery. Eryk possesses the remarkable ability to transform the human exterior. He improves the appearance of Hitler and Stalin, among others, discovers and touches up Marlene Dietrich’s looks, bestows dignity on the corpses of German officers at Stalingrad, and ensures that Lenin’s mummy doesn’t lose its beauty. Both the hero’s adventures and his origins, of course, find themselves outside the conventions of the realistic novel. Eryk is - literally - an alien, a benign spirit who has descended to Earth in order to improve on the work of the Creator. He makes the ugly beautiful, the old young, turns women into men (and vice versa), and changes the inalterable (including membership of the human race). The astonishing adventures of this ingenious make-up artist are a pretext for Chwin to ponder a number of philosophical issues. The author considers such questions as human identity in the twentieth century, the temptation to escape from the self into a mask or sham, the pressure to be beautiful, and illusory dreams of immortality. Stefan Chwin describes, through metaphor, the situation of art and the artist in the last century. - Dariusz Nowacki
Stefan Chwin – born in 1949. Prose and essay writer, and literary historian. The author of well-known and highly regarded novels: Death in Danzig (Hanemann) (1995), Esther (Esther) (1999), The Golden Pelican (Złoty Pelikan) (2003), The President’s Wife (Żona prezydenta) (2005). The last of his books to be published was the voluminous novel The Valley of Joy (Dolina Radości) (2006).
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