Review by Rob Spence
The only time I have been in Warsaw was in 1988, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. Poland was still a rather odd place to my liberal western eyes, and I was struck by the contrast between the massively ugly communist-era Palace of Culture, and the charm of the old town, which looked as if nothing had changed there for centuries. In my naïvety, of course, I had failed to recall that central Warsaw had been all but destroyed in the war, and the lovely buildings of the old town that I saw were in fact the result of meticulous post-war reconstruction. That stands as a kind of metaphor for Poland as a whole, a country whose borders have shifted across the map of Europe over the centuries, its rulers frequently changing, its identity being constantly extinguished and rekindled.
Warsaw, as the nation’s capital, presents a palimpsest of those changes, and this new collection of stories explores the changing perceptions of the city from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day in a chronologically arranged sequence. The collection is bookended, literally, by two stories that both, in their very different ways, examine the protean nature of the city. Bołeslaw Prus’s “Apparitions”, written in 1911, imagines the city as it might be in the future, in the drunken vision of friends gathered in an old town bar. The final tale, Krzysztof Varga’s “Return of the Evil One”, written in 2011, features another drink-induced vision, this time by a contemporary man who finds himself transported to the world of Warsaw in the nineteen-fifties. The century between these two stories is covered by some very evocative pieces, including a previously unpublished story by Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk.
Although this is primarily a collection of short fiction, some of the pieces are really a kind of literary reportage: Maria Kuncewicz’s memoir of a trip to the zoo in the inter-war years is one such, as is Zbigniew Mentzel’s autobiographical sketch “The Warsaw Map”, written in 2001. Otherwise, the selection takes the reader through Warsaw’s tumultuous twentieth century, including, inevitably, the events of the Warsaw Uprising, covered vividly in a poignant story, “The Funeral”, by Zofia Petersowa. Olga Tokarczuk’s contribution, “Che Guevara”, is not at all concerned with the Argentinian revolutionary, but with a man in a psychiatric clinic just before General Jaruzelski’s imposition of martial law in 1981. Perhaps the most representative story in terms of its coverage of Warsaw’s history is Antoni Libera’s “The View from Above and Below” in which an exile revisits Warsaw for the first time since his departure sixty years before. He meets his cousin, the son of his Uncle Oskar, who stayed in Warsaw, dying in the Uprising, and revisits the district of Źoliborz, which his uncle helped design in the thirties. The narrative moves through the twentieth century history of the city through the consciousness of the protagonist, and describes the city in both its pre- and post-war manifestations in very specific terms. Indeed, this specificity is a feature of this collection, offering the reader a really comprehensive view of the city. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, who has translated as well as selected these stories, confirms in her introduction that part of her aim was to give the reader a kind of literary guidebook to the city. There’s a map which highlights the various locations of the stories, which is useful addition to the text, as are her notes on the authors.
This is a fascinating and engaging collection, which will introduce anglophone readers to some important Polish authors, and immerse them in the rich history of the city.
Rob Spence’s home on the web is at robspence.org.uk.
See also our Shiny reviews of other collection in the ‘City Tales’ series: Paris, Barcelona, Lisbon, Dublin.
Translated and selected by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Warsaw Tales (Oxford University Press, 2024)) 978-0192855565, 230pp., paperback.
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This sounds very good. I’ll look for it.