Jacek Dehnel

Balzaciennes

Excerpt

This new set of stories by Jacek Dehnel includes all the features that are already familiar to readers of his novel "Lala": inter-textual games of post-modern provenance, and a camp mixture of style and elegant phrasing. I think elegance is the key word in describing Dehnel’s prose – that is what gives it flavour, even when, as in "Balzaciennes", he is telling what are essentially “straight stories” (a flamboyant reference to David Lynch’s film is quite appropriate for prose that is so full of cultural clues and references). The book consists of four novellas about: the unhappy marriage of the daughter of a rich textiles merchant and a young painter from the self-promoting world of Warsaw celebrities (“Meat Cold Cuts Clothing Textiles”); the small-scale family saga of the landowning Zarębskis, who have trouble making ends meet in the communist era and the new independent Poland (“Tońcia Zarębska”); the tale of a young man who escapes from cheerless reality into the world of old-fashioned style and manners, and makes a living teaching etiquette and good taste (“The Private Tutor’s Love”); and the story of the unsuccessful come-back of a third-rate communist-era chanteuse (“The Splendours and Miseries of a Stage Artiste’s Life in Her Well-Earned Retirement”). Taking his inspiration from Balzac’s "La Comédie Humaine", Dehnel attempts to depict a sort of cross-section of modern society, except that it is a rather an unusual one. Typically, as he writes about the present day, he says a lot about the past; some of his characters, such as Adrian Hełsztyński in “The Private Tutor’s Love”, are deeply immersed in it, and ignore the modern way of life. Is this Dehnel’s oblique way of judging our “here and now”? Perhaps. However, I think what really counts in his new stories is not so much his correct diagnosis of reality, as his stylistic skill and attention to detail. In short, this is prose for connoisseurs.

Robert Ostaszewski

Jacek Dehnel (born 1980) is a poet, translator, novelist and painter. In 2008 the German translation of his novel Lala was published, and more translations are under way, into Hebrew, Slovak, Hungarian, Italian, Croat and Lithuanian.