Sławomir Shuty

Motions

Excerpt

Thus far, Sławomir Shuty has been chiefly known as a prose writer who works within realistic conventions to present the ups and downs (but mainly the downs) of contemporary life, writing about over-inflated consumerism, the depression of corporate employees, and the tragi-comic fortunes of people whose income is below the national average. This is why his latest work, a novel entitled "Motions", comes as a surprise. This is madcap grotesque, a true freak-show of bizarre and twisted images and situations. On the surface, the story takes place in a small town, in a community of young people, third-rate actors, small-time drunks and barflies, people who would like to do something big, but aren’t quite sure what that might be. They drift around bars, go to parties, have flings with whoever comes along, and set up odd predicaments. They are caught in constant, anxious motion, in search of meaning, a goal of some sort that would be worth pursuing, but they only multiply the chaos of the world they’ve been thrown into. It would seem as though Shuty has decided to illustrate the chaos of the contemporary world, a chaos that embraces all spheres of life, language included. In his new prose, language is a garbage pit of threadbare phrases, words stripped of their content, in which kitsch mingles freely with the sublime. In "Motions", however, nothing is entirely clear or unambiguous. The world created in the novel might be merely a projection of one of the protagonist’s imaginations, a man whose ambition is to be a mad demiurge. Shuty writes: "the hooks binding reality slackened once and for all, and everything became one big accident, a muddle of sketchy fragments that shuffled and blended according to principles only they knew." Searching for those principles, tracing these winding narrative paths – some of which only lead you astray – might just prove fascinating for Shuty’s readers.

- Robert Ostaszewski