Jerzy Pilch’s book constitutes one of the most interesting collections of short stories to have been published in recent years. The individual tales are not linked by any common storyline. The main characters sometimes give the impression of being the same people at different ages - at various stages of their existence, and in differing family configurations. But there is little certainty in this assertion. If there is something that links these stories, it is rather the figure of the narrator, and the mood and style. The mood is one of grotesque melancholy, a mood of comical but undeniable sublimity that arises from the paradoxical juxtaposition of life and loss. It is not a matter of the passing of things themselves, but of the fact that for Pilch life becomes sublime only when it can be seen and experienced from the perspective of loss. One must sense the absolute impossibility of attaining that which is most important and most valuable if one is to live in a state of sublimity. Yet at the same time this fundamental lack renders life impossible - it is experienced as something insignificant and alien that is observed from a distance. Only from such a position is it possible to “commit suicide for the first time” - an act that is at once final and yet also repeatable. Suicide can be committed many times only when life itself ceases to have permanence. Problems are presented by everyday things: we recognize landscapes, household appliances, means of mass transit. At the same time, however, we find ourselves far away from history - so far that it is sometimes hard even to recognize whether this is prewar or postwar Poland. And we are even further from politics - the heroes of the stories seem to exist in an extrapolitical space and time in which only existential dilemmas prove to be real. Books like this are a rarity - firmly rooted in reality, yet refusing to be explained through the lens of politics. This quality emerges from the fact that the fundamental experience described by Pilch is unfulfillment. Not as a consequence of socialist or capitalist processes, not as a result of the operation of history, but as a chance yet at the same time irremovable feature of human life. It is for this reason that in Pilch’s prose a romance with the most beautiful woman in the world lasts for only two weeks; childhood is stamped with thoughts of suicide; the most meaningful recollections of his father are associated with the most expensive thing he ever bought; and the memory of his grandmother is maintained stubbornly through the image of her husband’s death, and that of a life that became the experience of loneliness. The unfulfillment that Pilch writes about causes three things of utmost importance to become incomplete, insufficiently defined, and unstable: personal identity, the world, and a reason for writing. To put it differently, unfulfillment, like a virus, contaminates everything and causes life to become a condition devoid of a clear goal, the world a dispensable entity, and writing a suspect activity.
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 »
