Andrzej Stasiuk

Taksim

Excerpt

In his latest novel Andrzej Stasiuk tells a tale of a very last phase of capitalism. His two main heroes — Paweł, a marketeer who circulates among the bazaars of these European provinces, and Włodek, his driver — suffer a symbolic and actual defeat in their encounter with the new force. Up till this moment they’d always managed to come out on top. Paweł in particular is like a knight errant of the first phase of capitalism in these parts. This phase — which involved the distribution of cut-price imitations of name-brand goods — lasted from the end of the 1980’s till the present day. Its masters were precisely folk like Paweł — self-appointed merchants, nomads of market routes, sailors who unerringly caught the winds of opportunity. They were the ones who crammed their battered automobiles with fourth-grade merchandise and drove it to the suburbs of Bucharest, Budapest, Prague, or Berlin. Society in those days resembled a starving vacuum cleaner that sucked up everything: socks, jackets, shoes, handbags, cosmetics, auto parts, housewares — all bearing stickers that said Paris-London-New York.
But now the next stage has come along — dirt-cheap goods from China. In place of the cheap stuff sold till now, which lasted two or three seasons, come low-grade goods that anyone can afford and that are essentially disposable. The traveling salesmen of yesterday are relegated to the level of clerks at other people’s stalls, yesterday’s culture of short-lived products becomes a culture of one-time use. Asia invades Europe, not with an army, but with trade. It floods the continent with knockoffs of knockoffs, in other words merchandise the Chinese copied from Central European products that were themselves copies of Western items.
If someone has the impression that Stasiuk has created a contemporary version of the story of how “the yellow race overcomes the white race,” they will only partly be right. Stasiuk is less interested in portraying the victors in this capitalist duel of deceptions, more in showing us the losers — that is to say, the pariahs of Europe, inhabitants of its poorest regions, people condemned to a worse life because they live in a worse place. These people acquire the cheapest goods, but they themselves, especially the women, are also turned into merchandise. The only thing Western Europe exports to Central Europe is its trash, its used objects, the detritus of its development, while from there it imports male bodies for its harsher jobs and female bodies for its entertainment. In this way the strength of money and the weakness of the provinces cause the ideal of Europe to enter liquidation. And since history driven by money has no brakes, it is a liquidation that cannot be reversed.

Przemysław Czapliński