Janusz Anderman

That’s All

About the author

Excerpt

The hero of the novel "That’s All" is a mature, embittered writer called Marek Torm. At one time he was a great literary star, author of eleven novels that were greatly admired and were published in huge print-runs. His run of good luck ended with the change of regime in 1989. Torm suffered a creative crisis, did not publish anything for a long time, and was quickly forgotten. He is convinced that in today’s literary culture the only writers with a chance of fame and recognition are those who are capable of causing a sensation (best of all a sex scandal) that the gutter press will write about, and that will attract the interest of television. He hopes that as the result of a shocking event his books will be reissued and a renewal of interest in him will follow, so he decides to videotape his own suicide. He plans to make a pitiful farewell speech to the camera and then shoot himself in the head with a pistol. For this purpose he travels from Warsaw to Krakow, the scene of his happy youth, when he enjoyed literary success and lots of amorous conquests. He moves into a flat that his publisher has provided for him as a convenient place to work. The narrative of "That’s All" is the frustrated writer’s monologue, and develops in two directions. On the present time-scale it is about the last three days preceding the suicide, which Torm spends on his own, drinking vodka and brooding on the past. The broadest layer is formed by these reflections – a sequence of digressive recollections and score-settling. Here the main feature, characterised by radical misogyny, is his effort to square accounts with the women in his life; into the foreground emerges the painful and at the same time extremely ironical balance sheet of his marriage. There are plenty of hints within the story to invalidate the reality of his declaration on the matter. Perhaps here we are dealing with a refined literary joke, a fiction within fiction, a morose as well as comical fantasy on the condition of the modern artist.

- Dariusz Nowacki

Janusz Anderman (born 1949) is a novelist and author of film scripts, stage and radio plays, as well as a translator of Czech literature.