Michał Witkowski

Margot

Excerpt

Michał Witkowski’s literary tour de force was "Lubiewo", a novel about the homosexual underground in communist Poland and the beginnings of gay culture in today’s Poland. In this and the books that followed Witkowski has shown himself to be a superb observer of social behaviour, gifted with humour and an excellent ear for language, the chronicler of an era of great change, in which stereotyping and fixed identities have come to an end, and less obvious things have finally had their day. The mixed fortunes of his characters, mainly arising from their alternative sexual orientation, can be regarded as a metaphor for the changes that have undermined things that once seemed certain and universal. It is no accident that the epigraph opening his latest novel is the first line from Ovid’s "Metamorphoses": “Of bodies changed to various forms I sing”. It is a story about Poland, and thus about a part of Europe that is undergoing a violent change of form, affecting people’s beliefs, habits, criteria for making judgements, needs and predilections. The Margot of the title is an unpredictable woman endowed with a large sexual appetite and a very male profession: she is a trucker, driving a refrigerated lorry on international routes. The other main character is Waldek Tangerine, a village lad who has made a name for himself on Big Brother and is a rising star of stage and television. They meet unexpectedly at the parish house of a businessman-priest who has established a media-entertainment empire, and whom Margot meets through her friend from a big Mafioso’s money-laundering hotel. These two and a whole gallery of marginal characters – Asia, a new Polish saint who talks on the radio; Greta, the epitome of macho who drives a German truck and has been given a woman’s nickname; Waldek’s lover, who is known as the Star Growing Old Gracefully; and a small crowd of people from television and show business who now embody the new elite – all feature in Witkowski’s wonderful book.

Marek Zaleski