Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine

In “Żebry Adama,” (Adam’s Begging) the first story in Wojciech Kuczok’s Widmokrąg (widmo – ghost; krąg – circle; widnokrąg – horizon), a naked beggar catches hold of the narrator and forces him to divest himself of first his (Armani) suit jacket, and then his trousers. It’s not meant, of course, to be an entirely realistic account of an everyday occurrence: it goes all metaphorical, phantasmagorical and poetico-rhetorical about a third of the way through with divagations on whether it is possible to understand freedom without having been set free and ruminations about the narrator’s relationship with his father. Also, Kuczok stops using full stops and paragraphing. Nevertheless, I say, let the pettifogging begin:

The naked man never says anything. He just indicates with his eyes that having got the narrator’s (Armani) jacket, he now wants the trousers. So the narrator takes off his trousers – without taking off his shoes! “Had it a trousers on it?” Flann O’Brien once asked. Yes, but no shoes. Or maybe Armani is known for making very broad trousers? Why even mention “Armani?” After the next war, plague, famine, flood or whatever cataclysm will next engulf Poland, people will still be reading books, maybe even this one (it’s not that bad – not my cup of tea but not bad on the whole). But will they still be wearing Armani? Will they understand that the narrator must be well-to-do if he has a suit called an “Armani”? Okay, Kuczok gives other clues that the narrator is well-off but why drag a story down with brand names in this way?

During the narrator’s fierce internal struggle with his father and his suppressed homosexuality and whatever you’re having yourself he recalls the time when he was caught in a tram without a ticket. He recalls the stage whispers of his fellow passengers, who accuse him of arrogance – a rich man like him should fly to work in his own aeroplane, not use trams, and certainly not sponge on the state by not buying a ticket. But the narrator tells us that he had tried to buy a ticket. The tramdriver had none so he went around these same passengers asking if anybody could sell him a ticket. Why, then, would they react with such hostility to his “arrogance”? Kuczok can be defended here: the narrator did not really hear their comments. He is only projecting. One could safely assume that the narrator has some kind of persecution complex (to simplify) or feels guilty about his wealth – were it not for Kuczok’s bare-foot blunder. As it is, the reader is unsure. Perhaps the passengers really did react so vehemently. Maybe Poles really are that petty and vicious… Or maybe Kuczok was careless.

Widmokrąg is a collection of five stories, each punctuated with an “interludium”, named after a work by Chopin (opus 28, nrs. 3, 15, 4 and 18 if you are interested). This immediately brought to my mind a book by Michał Komar called Wtajemniczenia (Initiations), reviewed in this week’s Polityka. The heroine, Ms. E., holds a salon where people gather to talk about this and that – Dürrenmatt, Sophocles, the traffic these days. The reviewer, Katarzyna Janowska, writes (with no apparent irony) “Order is bestowed […] by the rhythm of meals because in the salon not just ideas but also refined dishes are delectable. Omelette with oysters suits conversations about the essence of justice; plum tart goes with discourse on the philosophy of Shestov.” Ms. E. has a servant who describes Hegel’s prose thusly: “It reminds one of carefully prepared osso buco or carelessly grated crème brûlée.” I’ll be reviewing this fascinating book just as soon as I have completed my double first in Philosophy and Classics. In the meantime it’s beer, sandwiches and James Ellroy.

The same issue of Polityka also has an article about France. You don’t need to read it to see that it is identical to the previous ten thousand articles on France that have appeared outside of France. The title is “Cooling Volcano?” and the subhead reads in part “[How will Sarkozy] manage to change French society.” For my entire adult life I have been reading about how France is a failure and needs to reform. And yet it’s still there, still one of the richest countries in the world. I think I’ll spare myself the effort of reading another attack on the principle of the welfare state. That’s all these articles ever amount to.

Interviewed in Polityka (Oct 3^rd), Jacek Strzemieczny of the Civic Education Centre in Warsaw speaks in favour of sending your children to public, socially mixed schools. They prepare you better for life than “prestigious” schools where middle class children interact only with other middle class children. Asked how primary school principals detect the “good” pupils (or rather, winnow out the “bad” ones), he says it’s enough to call a meeting of future pupils’ parents and see if they even bother to come, or ask the children if they have had any contact with English.

I’ve commented before on the slavish devotion to the all-conquering English language of Poles – or rather, of some Poles. Some quarters are considerably more skeptical than the – ahem – elite (not that I count Strzemieczny among the slavish). It’s possible even to get the impression that, say, a Michał Witkowski could actually – unthinkably – be mocking devotees of English when he spells out English words phonetically in Margot. “Heloł” and “in czardż,” the loathsome media people say, while Waldemar Mandarynka’s trademark drink is Bacardi “brizzer” and in one place he refers to “Dragi, baraki, ful plazma na bekstejdżu!” It’s all much less reverent than what we meet a few lines down the page. Wrocław (repeatedly referred to by the show biz phoneys in the toe-curling diminutive “Wrocek”) is called “The Meeting Place”; its most prestigious (inevitably) property development is “Sky Tower.” These pretentiously idiotic names are not given phonetically: they’re the genuine products of complex-ridden PR gurus in Polish marketing departments.

Marta Dzido, in her Małż (Bivalve (zool.), mussel, clam; or, more likely given the book’s subject matter, short for “małżonek” (spouse)), also betrays less than 110% devotion to the Master Language, frequently defiling it with merely Polish spelling: “de namber ju ar trajink tu ricz…”, “Sajko bicz”, “Majteczki mejd in czajna”. Somehow much more effective than irony quotes, the phonetic spellings suggest a certain disillusionment with the promise of success held out by English boosters. Dzido is hardly a new Sinclair Lewis or John Steinbeck but there is something refreshing about the bucket of cold water she dumps on careerism in thrusting modern Poland. Her narrator is lucky enough to be asked by a newspaper to send 30 (!) ideas for articles to the editor. After a week she tries to get in touch with him:

Unfortunately he’s very busy, he has a very important meeting. He has an important board meeting. He’s in a meeting.* He just went out a minute ago. He’s on the phone. The boss can’t talk right now. He’s got a very important visitor. The boss is on a business trip. Unfortunately he can’t take your call. He’s in a meeting. He’s giving an interview. He’s riding his secretary behind closed doors in his office. He’s taking a dump on your thirty ideas.

There’s no need to know English. Just know someone.

* Polish seems to have more words for meeting than English does that I can think of off hand.

“Just have any old handsome face, cut in any old tattoos, pierce yourself more than the others, shave designs into your stubble, tilt your hat, carry a puppy in your arms, say controversial nonsense, swear, be more vulgar than the rest – and you’re a star.”

Those are Michał Witkowski’s instructions in his latest book, Margot. A part of it is the life story of Waldemar Bacardi Mandarynka (so-called because of the solarium-induced colour of his skin), a “martyr of early Polish show business.” Here’s Waldi on the subject of the jurors at his casting, as they say in “Polish” (they mean “audition”):

They nod to themselves, he [Waldi] is stupid, it’s good that he talks rubbish, that he flaunts his stupidity and annoys all the dying intelligentsia. They’re schizophrenic – they’re kind of former intelligentsia themselves: music critics and university graduates now transformed into media people. So they hate with all the more passion those of the intelligentsia that didn’t give in.

In a peculiar replay of communist Poland’s favouring of the children of workers and peasants, the intelligentsia jurors light on Waldi’s simple, rural background. One of them has read in Gazeta Wyborcza about “przystankersi”, disaffected country youth who hang around bus shelters, roughly corresponding to the urban phenomenon of “blokersi” (“przystanek”: bus stop; “blok”: block of flats). Waldi – although he is wearing artificial finger tips (“tipsy”) and has obviously turned his back on the countryside – plays up his humble origins and his membership of this semi-mythical group of “przystankers” (I suspected Witkowski of making it up but it turns out that some social anthropologist / Sunday supplement journo really did identify and describe such a subculture) and before you know it is eating sushi in Warsaw with the best of them.

I saved the best for first because in fact Margot is a disappointment. It tells a few stories, rather chaotically, and does not really draw them together well. To start with it’s a story of the life of truckers and the prostitutes that service them (quite explicit, it’s not an ideal Christmas present for your 7-year old nieces). Half way through, in a switch of subject “coś a là w podobie” Głowacki’s Ostatni cieć (The Last Caretaker), the narrator (Margot) introduces the life story of Waldemar Mandarynka: “While the enema dripped in me (because it’s not like a pear, it’s more like a drip)* Waldi honoured us with this story.” Waldi’s story is a straight satire of the shallow, celebrity-obsessed, dishonest, cruel, Warsaw-centric etc. etc. meeja. In it we meet many too-familiar types, such as the “Aging Gracefully – Yes, Gracefully – Star”, who could be any one of dozens of grotesquely primped, botoxed and face-lifted Polish female tv personalities whose age is impossible to gauge with more accuracy than “between 30 and 70.” It’s funny, rising to a farcical high-comedy kitsch explosion at the end but, lacking any real depth, easy (easy for Witkowski, that is). After Waldi’s story (about a third of the novel’s length) the narrative thread returns to Margot, but with only seven pages left there seems little point to telling us that she wandered off for casual sex in the moonlight.

Then again, I didn’t enjoy Ostatni cieć from the normally reliable Głowacki either so maybe this kind of structure just isn’t my thing. I look forward to Witkowski’s next book and in the meantime draw your attention to Bill Martin’s English translation of Lubiewo – Lovetown. You can read an extract on-line here.

* Literal translation. I haven’t the stomach to do the research required to bring it up to scratch.

A couple of weeks ago Jacek Dehnel had an article in Polityka in which he described his visit to Vienna. This week it’s Michał Witkowski’s turn: he was in Jerusalem and writes an interesting piece on it, on Polish-Jewish relations and on stereotypes. Here are the last lines: “What is the truth? What is a stereotype? I don’t know. I’m no expert. I’m just an ordinary tourist who wants to take a photograph but can’t because it’s the sabbath.” This is why I prefer Witkowski to Dehnel.

What with Sylwia Chutnik, Michał Witkowski and Dorota Masłowska’s Między nami dobrze jest, I’ve had quite a run of luck with books and plays by young writers lately. It’s not all good news on the young writing scene, though. Take novelist Jacek Dehnel (b. 1980), who wrote an article for Polityka a couple of weeks back (March 14th) that gives a flavour of the man, of the times, of the Polish intelligentsia.

He was in Venice. I was in Venice too, once, but I did it all wrong. I arrived on an overnight train, wandered around and saw the sights and stayed in a cheap hotel and ate pizza and got a throat infection and had to go back to the factory after only a few days. Also, I was there in the summer – a fatal mistake, Mr. Dehnel tells us, as summer is “…when the canals stink, and tourists of all countries unite in a great human river…” Bleedin’ tourists. He means me, of course. Mr. Dehnel was there in winter and he found it exactly as Brodski describes it in Znak wodny (“Watermark”). That’s pretty much how I remember it too: exactly like Mr. Wotsisname said. There were, as Jacek recalls and I too recall, lots of “avvocati,” “dottori” and simply heaps of “fondamenti.” Or I presume there were. I don’t speak Italian as well as Jacuś and I don’t know what these things are: advocados, daughters and foundations, presumably. It turns out lots of famous people are buried in Venice – Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde – no wait, that’s somewhere else. Diagilew, Strawiński, Pound… Did you know that Ezra Pound ordered two violin sonatas for his long-time lover Olga Rudge from Georges Antheil, whom Strawiński met in Berlin? It’s true.

The article brought back to me all too forcefully why I was unreluctantly forced to abandon Dehnel’s Lala after a few dozen pages.

Michal Witkowski’s Lubiewo (2005) - though much concerned with the passage of time, especially from communist Poland to the present, glorious, third republic - probably fits the description of “queer literature.” The Lubiewo of the title is a beach he goes to where he meets, among many others, a group of complex-free, open, right-on, emancipated gays - one with peroxide dreads, another with a tatoo - playing ball and speaking in the language of current affairs magazines. Recognising him as a writer, one of them says:

“You’ve got to write about us, about us Gays… It has to be about two middle class gays, university educated, doctoral students in management and finances*, bespectacled, wearing jumpers… So they’ve created a lasting relationship and want to adopt a child but they keep running into problems. Society - get me? - won’t accept them even though they’re cultured and peaceful, as the reader sees. To make the contrast greater let their neighbours have a horribly dysfunctional relationship. They drink and beat their children but they’re the ones the state lets adopt children where it refuses our couple the right, even though a boy (a boy!) would be on the pig’s back with them. [...]”

“Umm. A great idea for a book, an excellent Valentine’s day present: gay couples would buy it in the shopping centres. I’ll run along now and write it. Gotta dash - I might make some money off it.”

Perhaps he would have made some money too but that is most emphatically not the book Witkowski wrote. This is what he wrote (using feminine grammatical forms - the right-on gays use masculine forms): “And I’m an intolerant old unfit, bad over the top faggot as closed to all your discourses as a communist era butcher’s after six. I am Alexis Carrington!” Elsewhere, with reference to the right-on gays’ meaningful relationships he writes “Ja chcę nieznajomego, co mnie wyrżnie jak burą sukę…” This one is not easy to translate, so I’ll just settle for “I want a stranger that’ll ride me like an old bike…” This time the pronoun is no longer masculine or feminine but “co,” which applies to objects…. Lubiewo is rough trading, no-holds barred stuff. An English translation is apparently in the works and I would recommend it.

* They’re a step up from the aspirations of Ala in Masłowska’s Wojna polsko-ruska pod flagą bialo-czerwoną (White and Red), who suggests that the narrator must be studying “administration and management” - finances are always better that admin - but it’s good to see that not everyone in Poland has fully bought into chimera economics. Come to think of it, there’s a well-known line from a communist era film in which a character’s profession is described as “director” - of what, of course, it didn’t matter, as he was a made (party) man. Plus ca change!

Sylwia Chutnik again:

“All the time the old gits are blowing their big noses into flannel handkerchiefs and snorting the leftover phlegm back into themselves, into their lungs. Maybe it’ll come in useful later? Maybe, when that rainy day comes, you go for the phlegm and eat it for dinner.”

Chutnik easily avoids the intellectuo-philosophising that mars so much Polish writing but also avoids the traps of Polish “ousiderism.” Her characters are from the margins - or thereabouts - of society but despite the cruelty (in Chutnik hell is others) there is none of the “look at me” wallowing in filth and degradation that passes for documentary-style realism in the works of Stasiuk and Nowakowski. What alarms in Chutnik is how broad the margins of modern Polish society have become - not just winos and criminals, but the old, the unmarried, children, non-conformists…

She has already won prizes and acclaim in Poland and if there is any justice in publishing she will be one to watch outside of the country too.
Kieszonkowy atlas kobiety

Olga Tokarczuk, my most favouritest writer of them all, has an article in the latest Polityka. It’s travel literature, my most favouritest genre of them all. She’s been to China: “His [Mao's] face is found in the most unlikely places: on the walls of buildings–” Hold on, hold on a minute there. The wall of a building is an unusual place to find the image of a dead communist leader? Has Tokarczuk never heard of Cuba? — “on the label of a bottle of mineral water, on wallets, on tiszerty [sic]–” Again, just a minute there. A tee-shirt is an unusual place to find the picture of a dead communist leader? Has Tokarczuk never heard of students? — “and the faces of watches.”

“How is it possible that someone who caused so many deaths is worshipped by the people?” she asks someone. The person answers (”calmly and with conviction”) that Mao is like a river, sowing destruction but also fertilising land. If a westerner wrote like Tokarczuk Polish critics would be all over him like a rash, and rightly so. China is a totalitarian state, they would say. Such a naive question would be treated with great suspicion, as a provocation. The wrong answer could lead to the work camps, and so on. Has Tokarczuk never heard of communist Poland? She was born there, after all.

This is why, Kapuściński aside, I don’t like travel writing

Sylwia Chutnik, who has been looking out at us from numerous magazine covers and newspaper interviews over the last few months, is a feminist and a radical. She also likes punk and wrote a book called A Pocket Atlas of Women, which is actually very good. Depressing as all hell of course but a welcome antidote to the second rate glitter of self-obsessed award ceremonies that seem to take up so much time on television. Here’s a rough and ready (I have no dictionary to hand, for example) translation. I’ve put in italics those words that were in English in the original and have not been thoroughly borrowed into Polish:

“Madwomen have annual international conferences during which they discuss their rights while eating the wonderful catered food. There are special Power Point presentations, identity badges and special folders containing didactic materials. The madwomen give talks in which they sum up their fucked up lives. They complain about the paucity of EU funding, murderous tax regulations and the low level of social awareness in the area of work-life-madness balance. Madwomen have their own clubs, chatrooms, discussion forums, their own subculture, language and interests. Mańka from Ochota, then, is a part of the global society of madwomen, hysterics saints, suicides and damned. Even still, she feels lonely and empty. That’s the way it is when the Housewife is cut off from her natural environment of crumbs and dust.”

And in a further break with Polish tradition, Chutnik seems to be able to avoid the temptation of dropping brand names. She writes “a collection of toys from egg surprises.” I don’t know if a male Polish intellectual writer could have restrained himself from writing “kindersurprise.”

The Eastern Europeans are at it again: getting all coy and mystical about The Meaning of Life and language’s inability to grasp it. Eastern European writers have the Big Questions tapped, you understand, but language can’t cut it. Yes, I’ve been reading Sandor Márai again, this time a collection of short stories called Magic, which does not seem to have been translated into English (what would be the point…?) or I would put this entry on the Book in this Blog page.

Here’s Marai up to his tricks in “The Mistake,” the story of a married couple who tire of their apartment, move into a more modern one, don’t like that either, and return to the original one, which still doesn’t satisfy them:

‘You know what kind of an apartment this is? It’s real.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said the woman.

‘But I understand,’ the man replied seriously. ‘I understand but I can’t say it any other way.’

How long can you continue stringing readers along with false promise of revelation only at the last moment to say that ‘you wouldn’t understand’? It’s like those dreams where you think you have discovered some important truth but can never recall it when you wake, even if every other detail is clear in your mind’s eye - you know, those really annoying dreams.

Another story is called “The Explanation.” As you should be able to guess by now, its title is wildly misleading. It’s about Danton, who realises What It’s All About on his way to the guillotine but, well:

He opened his swollen lips to cry out the explanation to the whole world. But then the drums rolled and the officer read out the list of the names of the condemned. So he fell silent, looked at the ground and smiled.

Even if he couldn’t find it in him to tell the world, he might at least have told the readers.