This blog has already spent some time dealing with the paternalistic Italian laws that govern what you can, and can’t say. We’ll remind readers that, in a political context, one is entitled to call Silvio Berlusconi a buffoon but to suggest it in general may be another kettle of slanderous fish (although, one has to […]
The Tailor and Ansty (sometimes known as The Tailor and Anstey) by Eric Cross was considered so fiendishly obscene or indecent in its general tendency that it was for many years banned in Ireland. When parts of it were quoted in a Seanad (senate) debate in the 1940s there were calls for the quoted bits […]
I have no idea whether Sherry Jone’s novel The Jewel of Medina originally deserved to be published, and I’m not quick off the bat to scold Random House, the publisher which decided at the last minute to not publish the novel after they were warned that it may cause offence to Muslims. Publishing is a subjective […]
Regular readers of Three Monkeys will know that we have a soft-spot for the Italian literary collective Wu Ming, the people behind novels like Q and 54 (which is very much on our ‘to-review’ list). Wu Ming I (there are five of them) has just published a thoughtful piece where he attempts to define what […]
The joke that was the decision to press charges against satirist Sabina Guzzanti – in poorer taste than any of Guzzanti’s ‘vulgar’ jabs at Italy’s ruling classes (Vatican included) – has been shelved by justice minister Angelino Alfano. The Italian press, which in its own topsy-turvy way seems to take more offence at satirists like […]
“Poles can pay less” is the cheering headline in April 4th’s Gazeta Wyborcza. This storyette, tucked away in the boring old business section, is about how a Polish building company operating in Germany has won the right to pay its workers less than the existing, collectively bargained industry rate in Germany. The European Court decided […]
Janusz Głowacki used to smuggle criticism past the censor by dressing it up as extravagant praise, comparing favourably, for instance, the since-forgotten socialist realist book Głupia sprawa (A Silly Matter) by Dobrowolski with the publication of the first Polish translation of Ulysses. He says he got letters from some readers saying: you know, that Głupia […]
Cudowna Melina (Wonderful Drinking Den) by Kazimierz Orłoś is an interesting case of a book that requires a certain knowledge of its times to be fully appreciated. Written in Communist Poland (1971), it is, to say the least, schematic. You can almost guess the pattern: an idealistic young party apparatchik comes to town and cleans […]
There was a stick but there was carrot too. Among the ways in which the Communist authorities in Poland tried to keep writers and creative types in line was by introducing in 1978 a tax free allowance of 144,000 zł per annum for them. This at a time when the average monthly wage was 4 […]
Gazeta Wyborcza has launched a series called “fifteen themes” of the third (i.e. post 1989) Republic of Poland. Part one deals with censorship. There is a photo of a page from the GW of July 10th 1989 in which two cuts have been forced by the censor. In place of the censored information is [—-], […]
