 | Muza
Warszawa 2008
145 x 205
544 pages
paperback
ISBN 978-83-7495-546-1 |
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Aleksander KościówApologise
Excerpt
Since giving up his academic career and losing the woman he loved, Błażej has been leading a boring life devoid of entertainment. With every passing year he sinks deeper and deeper into apathy, and even drops his greatest passion, which is mountain climbing. He is sure nothing will change, and maybe he doesn’t even want it to. But a chance encounter shifts his fate onto completely different tracks. On his way home from work, he almost runs over a teenage girl called Zuzanna (who insists, however, that she is really called Fix), who has run away from someone. At first it looks as if that someone is Marta, but then it turns out she is not. Błażej also discovers that Marta has come to Warsaw to look for her young son, Szymon, who has gone missing in strange circumstances. On pure impulse, Błażej decides to help the woman with her search, in which Zuzanna is also going to play a major role…
So at first the action of this novel looks fairly straightforward, but that is just an illusion. Aleksander Kościów wouldn’t be himself if he didn’t suddenly veer off into the realm of his unbridled imagination, which pervades the reader’s familiar everyday world. Fix claims she is a sort of superhero who is fighting in a parallel world against a vulture-man, who is also lying in wait for Marta’s missing son. At first the adults regard her as a crazy teenager with a hyperactive imagination, but they change their attitude when they find out how easily Fix can lead them to a series of clues left by the missing boy. The narrative is on two levels. The first depicts a “crazy week” in the lives of Błażej and Marta, spent looking for her son. The other describes the wanderings of Dal – who is probably Szymon – in a world like something out of a computer game. As he tells his thrilling, action-packed story, Kościów also poses some important questions: do we really know what sort of world we happen to live in? As we make major life choices, should we necessarily be guided by common sense and reason, or would it be better to trust our intuition? For the adults, looking for Szymon becomes a search for themselves as well; at the end of it they will be slightly different people from at the start.
Robert Ostaszewski
Aleksander Kościów (born 1974) is by training a composer and viola player. Apologise is his second novel.
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