 | Czarne
Wolowiec 2007
125 × 195
285 pages
paperback
ISBN: 978-83-7536-014-1
Translation rights: Czarne |
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Grzegorz KopaczewskiFoundry
Excerpt
The year is 2008. A special zone called Huta [Foundry] has become the model district of post-modern Poland, maybe even of Europe. The old industrial areas (based on actual districts of Katowice) have been adapted into elegant condominiums, a gorgeous district inhabited by successful and cultured people, academics and artists. The novel's Huta is a sort of combination between Krzemowa Valley and Greenwich Village. International state-of-the-art technology concerns have their headquarters here, it's swarming with artistic clubs and galleries. What's more - all the Utopias of the civic society have been realised in Huta, every resident is happy, creative and free from the hell of consumerism. But the fantastical (futuristic) crosses paths with the dystopian here. Huta is also a ghetto, an artificial mini-city fenced off by a high wall and monitored by hundreds of cameras. On the outside remains Upper Silesia, and beyond - the Poland that didn't make the grade.
It is against a backdrop of this sort that we encounter our main protagonist, Tomasz, a young sociology doctoral student who has stumbled onto the trail of a university conspiracy, and later becomes a worker at a mysterious Institute and takes part in special services duels.
The social experiment named Huta has its basis in scholarship. Everything started from the philosophical and sociological writings of a contemporary of Hegel's, Kaspar Kuhn, who not only created a narrative to compete with Marx's about the logic of societal development, but also developed the bases of prognostic statistics, indispensable algorithms etc. This is, parenthetically speaking, a fiction within a fiction: on the one hand Kopaczewski has invented Kuhn along with his stormy biography and subversive academic legacy, and on the other - as it turns out in the work's conclusion - the German philosopher is also an invention of the novel's protagonists, brilliant, rebellious and eccentric scholars of the Silesian University. The author of Huta plays splendidly with academic discourse, and the reader along with it. And this is what is best and most unique about this novel.
Dariusz Nowacki
Grzegorz Kopaczewski (born 1977) is a prose-writer, the author of two novels: "Global Nation. Images from the Days of Pop-Culture" (2004) and "Huta" (2007).
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