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September 29, 2006
Bad
Judging by word of mouth (and not the increasingly obviously phoney bestseller lists bookshops put up by the door to clear out old stock), Leopold Tyrmand's Z?y (Bad) is the most popular Polish book I know of. Everyone loves this story of a superhero in the grey days of Polish communism. It's a good few hundred pages but so many people can't be wrong, so I picked it up and started to read. It started off alright. I was only slightly put off by Tyrmand's habit of labelling everyone by the kind of clothes they wear. It's a very Varsovian book and I assumed he was trying to give a flavour of the times: the fashions and the clothes, but also the accents, the moustaches. But as the characters multiplied it all started to get frustrating. This guy wearing the houndstooth jacket - is he the one with the luxuriant moustache or is that the man with the too-short trousers? And is Agnieszka the girl we met at the beginning who was wearing a beret? What happened to the man in the fake leather jacket? Is he going to be in the book again? Oh, here he is - or is that someone else, also wearing a fake leather jacket? Finally, I realised what was wrong. Tyrmand was trying to write the book like you would make a film. Crowd scenes work okay in films. You can introduce fifty people in the first scene and yes, the viewer does single them out by means of visual clues - the checked cap, the green boots, the fact that the camera lingers on one to the near exclusion of the rest. It either doesn't work that way in books or my imagination is not plastic enough to keep track of ciphers like "black boots" and "red face." Z?y went the same way as War and Peace, abandoned after the 76th physical description of a possibly insignificant character in chapter one.
Posted by hgrodsk at September 29, 2006 04:15 PM
Comments
It's funny coincidence. I've just started reading ZLY again after 20 years when acidentally found your website. I'm polish and from Warsaw so, of course, i have to love this book :) I also don't have any problems with multitude of characters. But i don't think it's because of my background. Reading is not only ability to syllabize the word. It's the skill of transforming, in your brain, words into pictures (i read once that one can get this skill only as child, it's almost impossible to learn how to read and understand when you're older).
I read ZLY being 15 and at the same time i read "The world according to Garp", a book also full of weird or mysterious characters appearing and disappearing. I didn't get lost in any of them.
Once you picture a man in fake burberry coat you'll never mistake him for another man in fake burberry coat. Especially that the first one is former boxer and the second twice smaller playboy.
Posted by: maria at October 3, 2006 03:00 PM
Yes, but which one is Burberry?
Posted by: Henry Grodsk at October 3, 2006 06:17 PM