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Since the envoys had brought news of the arrival of the Emperor, Bolesław’s kingdom had been overwhelmed by an all-encompassing state of commotion. Aside from the settlers living deep within the deepest forests, there was probably no one who did not, in some way or other, (...)
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8
The phones are always going wrong, so my parents aren’t upset when there’s no dialling tone. They’re at the fortieth birthday party of a female friend from their class at high school. They say they’re going downstairs to the phone booth for a (...)
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Ewa KurylukCentury 21
"All ages are contemporaneous", said Ezra Pound. And so they are in Century 21, a novel about an exile's inner life in a country of imagination and memory where the unity of time and space can be ignored. Thus dead writers, poets, philosophers and painters can dine with characters out of novels. And the future "moon scholars" can discuss war or love with our contemporaries: people who are starved for affection, lost in transit, ready to slip into somebody else's skin, and speaking in English, their second language, with a heavy accent. In Ewa Kuryluk's book Anna Karenina writes about Simone Weil, Joseph Conrad meets Malcolm Lowry in Mexico, Goethe presides over a literary institute made of such members as Italo Svevo and Sextus Propertius, and Djuna Barnes, dying from AIDS, visits Moses Maimonides in Kyoto.
Century 21, a deeply moving and original novel, has many fans in the United States and Poland. But it will gain many more when translated into other languages.
Century 21
GAZING AT THE GOLDEN THREAD OF THE SETTINNG SUN as it bridges the shores of Manhattan and New Jersey, Goethe writes: A shipwreck may also take place on dry land. It's fine and praiseworthy to recover from an accident and put oneself right as quickly as possible. Life is only calculated in terms of profit and loss. But what if a shipwreck happens to the whole world and the earth cannot recover from it? This is the question I have to address in the last act of Faust II - and the reason why I visit the New World. I have come here to perceive in a new light the old Rome that seems to be with us still, but isn't with us anymore. My journey wasn't calculated in terms of profit, how could Moses accuse me of that? I want to understand how much of our culture can be lost without uprooting humanity entirely, and to what extent our relations can become casual without undermining the individual self and destroying the collective psyche. But does a world soul exist? In my youth I believed in it. Now I suspect that psychology may be identical with culture.
In Elective Affinities, my best book, I noted that a life without love is only a comédie a tiroir, a poor episodic play. One pulls open one drawer after another and shuts it again, hurrying on the next one. Anything that is good or important only hangs together in a haphazard manner. One must be starting again from the beginning and would be glad to end anywhere. But in the New World there seems to be little affection and closeness. Life appears hectic and fragmented. My metaphor of the tiroir comes true. Nothing is permanent, everything falls apart, is glued back together, collapses again. In principle flux appeals to me, but I'm suprised to see that the entire individual life and the whole society can be reduced to sheer busyness. Experiencing constant movement, I become afraid of the spiritual chaos that may result from it.
In order not to deviate from my old habits, I'm after fresh females whom I want to cleanse my corroded shell. But the impersonal way they do it here upsets me. All my life I have believed in sex as a commodity. But compared to how they deal with it in America, I feel like an incorrigible romantic. I cannot accept that the terms of each intercourse are set in advance, and that every detail is openly discussed. When I ask a blonde to sit in my lap, she returns my request with a long list of her own requirements: the exact duration of every single copulation, the number of them, the exclusion or inclusion of oral sex, the type of birth control we're going to use, and ultimately: who comes first. But the way women look and behave astonishes me even more than their interest in technicalities. Only a hardly perceptible je ne sais quoi hints at age differences and I have real trouble deciding if a certain lean and supple female part belongs to a twenty or forty-year-old. Finally, I'm shattered by the freedom with which they approach me. For the first time not women but I am a sex object. Focusing on my tiny mirror image in their pupils, I ask myself: how much pleasure can you still supply? - a question they ask themselves at the same time.
Ewa KURYLUK (b.1946) - an art historian, artist, essayist and writer, she was born in Cracow and studied painting and art history there. She has lived since 1981 in New York and Paris, lecturing at American universities and writing in English.
Polish edition by Wydawnictwo W.A.B.
English edition by Dalkey Archive Press: Normal, IL 1992
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There are more than 31,000 publishers registered in Poland. However, the market is highly concentrated. The 300 largest publishing firms still hold almost 98 per cent of it. More »
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