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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.

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

I despatched Ukraine a few weeks ago. Epic though the travelogue was, panoramic and sweeping in its grandeur, it turns out that my deft, broad brushstrokes that summed up an entire country in a series of arresting images left out a few minor details. Here comes Daniel Olkowicz in this week’s Polityka with his impressi—errr, painstakingly researched, almost academically cautious report on certain selected aspects of the country, hedged about with a thicket of qualifying phrases and concessions:
“Dzisiaj ukraińskie hotele w niczym już nie odbiegają od europejskich standardów”
“Today, Ukrainian hotels do not in any way differ from European standards”
I beg to differ. All Ukrainian hotels are “ancient,” “aging,” “Soviet-era,” and “antediluvian.” I know: I was in one. True, it wasn’t in Kiev, where Olkowicz prepared his report but what difference does that make? If Olkowicz can infer from the quality of his expense-accounted hotel that all other hotels in the country are excellent, I can do likewise in my dreary quarters. It’s pure coincidence that Olkowicz’s report comes from the capital and mine from the provinces…

Ukraine is a land of contrasts. No wait - the past is a constant companion in Ukraine. Or how about Ukraine is the Montana of Europe? A trip to Ukraine is a trip back in time? Awful stuff but people seem to like it. According to Google Chile, Guinea (“the Switzerland of Africa”), Kansas, Jamaica, Iran, Mozambique, Brazil, South Africa, Quebec, India and – I don’t have time to check the other 71,700 hits – are all “lands of contrasts.” So since people like it, let me say that in describing my hotel room I would have recourse to such words as “ancient,” “aging,” “Soviet-era,” and “antediluvian.” The glint of metal in mouths, pot-holed roads, vodka, street markets, derelict buildings in the centres of thriving towns, vodka, strong cigarettes, broken-down cars (many of them “ancient” or “Soviet era”) – there’s no need to assemble all of that into sentences.

Unusually, I was in a group. When asked how I had slept in the draughty, etc etc etc hotel room I answered in accordance with the truth that I had slept very well. However, it turned out that some of the younger members of the party had not slept so well: their rooms were draughty, Soviet-era etc etc etc. Since I am engaged in Travel Writing I will pronounce the following: a new generation has grown up unaware of the hardships of communist Poland and are now voting for Donald Tusk with their I-pods while on the way to work in multinational PR agencies.

Later that day I ordered a soup called “Solianka.” There was a lemon in it. It’s perfectly normal.

I complimented Beatroot for predicting a rapprochement between PO (Civic Platform) and PiS (Law and “Justice”) the other day. But now the nearly-ruling PiS looks like it’s getting into bed with Lepper’s Samoobrona (see previous post). Political commentators in Poland seem to be in the enviable position that any prediction they make - any at all - will come true soon enough.

Well, there’s no trick in that so I’ll turn to books:

Against my better judgement, I bought Andrzej Stasiuk’s Jadąc do Babadag (”Going to Babadag”). I cannot abide travel writing. Travelling I like and I even like travellers� tales. But books about travel bore me unspeakably. Stasiuk, though, has quite a reputation and I liked his Opowieści Galicyjskie (”Tales of Galicia”, translated into English by Margarita Nafpaktitis).

And indeed, it is clear from the first words of Jadąc do Babadag that this man is a writer, not a travel-writer: “Yes, it is only that fear, those searches, traces, stories, which are to obscure the unattainable line of the horizon. It is night again and everything is receding, disappearing, covered by the black sky.” Besides, this is not western literature. We are firmly in central European territory and inevitably, as the back-cover blurb says, the book is “a journey into the heart of the consciousness of an inhabitant of that part of Europe which has always been regarded as inferior, benighted, primitive and backward.” Indeed. If it is a journey into the heart of Stasiuk’s soul that would explain why he finds the same things everywhere he goes, from Albania to Hungary through Slovakia, Poland and Romania: trash, decay, emptiness, the provinces, rootlessness, bohemia.

Perhaps if he stayed put for more than a few minutes in these Babadags and Sz�k�sveresegyh�zas he would find something that was not already on his mind when he arrived (see interview at www.polishwriting.net). I still have not been brought around to travel writing.