 | Świat Książki
Warszawa 2008
130x215
192 pages
paperback
ISBN 978-83-2471-161-1
Translation rights: Świat Książki |
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Jerzy PilchMarch, Polonia
About the Author
Excerpt
The time: the first decade of the twenty-first century. The place: Poland. Yet these are not fixed coordinates, because nothing in this novel is certain, aside from the moment when the narrator goes out on the eve of his 52nd birthday intending to meet a new woman. He does not achieve his goal, but instead finds himself at an immense party thrown by Benjamin Infamus, who under martial law was the reviled spokesman of the communist authorities, and is now immensely rich. The parties held at his mansion are the subject of legendary stories told all around Poland.
The attraction of Infamus’s home is an attraction to depravity. When people cross the threshold of his mansion they lose their identity. They are left with ritual disputes, which are all the fiercer for being utterly unproductive. The disputes take place above cellars in which the host has assembled a museum of the 20th century, including wax figures of Polish writers, world leaders and local communists. There are the skulls of victims of the Katyń massacre, the death masks of some famous people, women’s lingerie and soccer strips of all the teams in the world. The heart of the subterranean part of the mansion, the most closely guarded place, is a special room occupied by a secret martyr—an unidentified dead or half-dead victim of history. Whoever he is, he functions in everyone’s awareness as a reproach and at the same time as a human relic.
March, Polonia is a sort of diagnosis of groups that seek to monopolize the right to formulate communal ideas. In a phantasmagorical vision we see two camps at odds with one another: in one, all the old representatives of historical conflict are turned into museum exhibits; in the other, anachronistic nationalist-Catholic notions provide support for theatrical preparations for a massacre. Both sides “have stopped believing that there are normal people living in Poland, and so they manufacture artificial conflicts and make-believe solutions. Out of this confusion a perfidious apocalypse is born: the nationalists need Infamus’s debauchery in order to set up their holiness in opposition to it, while the postmodern side requires the moral outrage of the patriots, because without it they cannot attain the gratification that arises from transgressing national commandments.
It is no surprise, then, that in the closing scenes the narrator climbs into a carriage and leaves the country.
Przemysław Czapliński
Jerzy Pilch (b. 1952), novelist and columnist, is one of the best-known writers in Poland today.
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