Paweł Huelle

Cold Sea Tales

Excerpt

Paweł Huelle is undoubtedly one of Poland’s best contemporary novelists, as his latest collection of short stories confirms. In some of them we find a continuation of topics that have featured before in his work, such as the history of the Mennonite congregation that settled in Żuławy, and whose traditions and culture were brought to an end by the Second World War. However, most of the stories take up new themes. They are not, as in Huelle’s previous work, almost exclusively related to the city of Gdańsk. This time his protagonists set off into various parts of the world: to the island of Öland, to Zurich, New York, the Sahara and so on. Thus their reality becomes much larger, though even so most of the plots take the reader to the neighbourhood of Huelle’s native city, which,  like a wind-rose, focuses various human fortunes. At the centre of these stories is human fate regarded like a hieroglyph, because the author looks for meaning in it, some structural crowning point, but what he usually finds is a mystery, an unexpected or quite absurd coincidence. Joachim von Kotwitz, the descendant of a Pomeranian Junker family, is tired and disgusted by nationalist conflicts in his own home land and devotes his life and property to the search for a mythical “primordial language”, common to all people. But having reached the Sahara he falls into the hands of Berber robbers (Abulafia). The hero of Franz Carl Weber unexpectedly inherits a large sum of money from his father, but on a journey to Zurich to collect his golden fleece, instead of behaving like a millionaire, he tries to make the dreams of his childhood and youth come true, involving an electric railway and a romantic adventure with a woman he met by chance and who is mad with disappointed love.
Thus in Huelle’s work the hieroglyph of life has no unambiguous solution – the hero stares at its declensions like the recommendations of the Chinese Book of Changes, which gives foggy answers requiring further interpretation, though perhaps it is not so much about understanding the meaning of events as merely – in the words of the mysterious Doctor Cheng – “liberating oneself from thought and accepting reality”.

Jerzy Jarzębski