The hero of
Janusz Rudnicki’s new novel comes back from Germany to his hometown of Koźle, but isn’t quite sure what to do with himself. Out of boredom he smears his face in black shoe polish, but just then the post lady calls him out onto the stairwell, the door of his flat slams shut and a gas explosion destroys his block. Bad things are happening all over the country anyway, because time and again gas keeps exploding in different places; along with others who have lost the roof over their heads, the hero wanders about Poland and Germany having weird adventures… Rudnicki has thought up a tale consisting of a series of grotesque and absurd situations, sometimes funny, sometimes dreadful. But essentially the book is about extremely serious matters. Once again Rudnicki pits himself against the problem, to borrow a term from Zbigniew Kruszyński, of “relocated people” who have left their country in search of a place of their own but get stuck for ever, as Rudnicki puts it, “in twine”, with no roots and no certainty, struggling with an unstable identity. Come On, Let’s Go is also about Polish-German traumas, about a piece of history that is still stamping its mark on the present day, about executioners who become victims and victims who become executioners. Rudnicki’s prose is tragi-comic, disturbing, and stylistically superb. There is no denying few writers are as good at turning a phrase as this one.
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 »
