'A Treatise on Shelling Beans' by Wiesław Myśliwski (Review)

Wiesław Myśliwski took out the Best Translated Book Award back in 2012 with Stone upon Stone, and the Polish writer looks certain to be in the running this year too.  Once again, Archipelago Books have brought us a wonderful piece of translated fiction, one which will no doubt find its way onto many shelves (and e-readers) in the months to come.  The big question though is whether Myśliwski's new book has what it takes to pull off a repeat victory - let's have a look, shall we?

*****
A Treatise on Shelling Beans (translated by Bill Johnston, e-copy courtesy of the publishers) is a conversation between an old man, the caretaker of a collection of holiday cabins by a lake, and a mysterious visitor, one who has come to ask for some beans.  What starts as a simple request turns into a long rambling monologue in which the old man expounds on life, music, memory - and beans, of course.  As he rattles on, painting names back on to faded nameplates, we begin to feel a sense of unease.  Why is he bringing up the past?  What is he really doing in this isolated part of the country?  Just who is this stranger anyway - and what has actually brought him to the old man's door?  The reader senses that it isn't really for a handful of beans...

A Treatise on Shelling Beans is one long, fluent, engaging monologue, albeit rambling and tangential at times.  The unnamed storyteller is the archetypal unreliable narrator, and as he continues spinning his yarns, the reader is focused not just on the content of his tales but also on how much we can trust him:

"I liked children, I still do, as I said.  But I didn't want any of my own.  Why not?  I'll leave it to you to figure out.  Me, I might not tell the truth."
p.248 (Archipelago Books, 2013)

Which is a bit of a problem - as his is the only voice we hear, we're pretty much at his mercy.

Of course, where there's a speaker, there's usually a listener, and the character known only as the visitor fills that role in this novel.  With the story told in the first person (by a man who barely pauses for breath), it would be fairly difficult to learn much about the interlocutor, but it's as if Myśliwski goes out of his way to keep the identity of the visitor a secret.  The reader is reduced to hunting for clues in the old man's stories, wondering if the request for beans, or his skill at a game involving a matchbox is a clue as to his identity...

However, for the most part, our attention is dragged back to the old man, as it's easier to piece together a picture of his life from the stories he weaves.  Going right back to his childhood, he uses the request for beans as a springboard into his youth, painting a picture of a family in the country sitting around each evening shelling happily away.  He then moves on to his later life, telling of his experiences at a boarding school, his training as an electrician and his time playing the saxophone in bands (both at home and abroad).  The stories always seem to be fragmentary, and it takes a while for the reader to cotton on to what is missing from the picture - the war.

It takes a while to get there but, as we suspect, there is a dark side to the novel, a tragic background which casts new light on the rest of the old man's stories:

"People often think, what could possibly have changed in a place where they've grown beans since forever.  But how did you manage to hold on to the conviction that there are timeless places like that?  That I can't understand.  Didn't you know that places like to mislead us?  Everything misleads us, it's true.  But places more than anything.  If it weren't for these nameplates I myself wouldn't know that this was the place."
p.9 (Archipelago Books, 2013)

Behind this seemingly innocuous statement lies the key to the novel - what happened in the village during the war...

Myśliwski also dwells on the idea of memory, and like his narrator, it's a concept that he doesn't regard as entirely reliable:

"I don't know if you agree, but in my view memory is like light that's streaming toward us from a long-dead star.  Or even just from a kerosene lamp.  Except it's not always able to reach us during our lifetime.  It depends how far it has to travel and how far away from it we are.  Because those two things aren't the same.  Actually, it may be that everything in general is memory.  The whole of this world of ours ever since it's existed.   Including the two of us here, these dogs.  Whose memory?  That I don't know." (p.32)

In the old man's eyes, the past is a creation, a tale made up of subjective memories - simply a collection of stories.  Of course, the thing with stories is that the way they unfold depends on who's telling them, and it's very possible that a different voice will have a very different view of events.

As with the previous English-language release, Bill Johnston has done a great job of capturing the unique tone of the old man, in a style which, while similar to that of Stone upon Stone, is also recognisably different.  Again, the language used is simple and uncomplicated on the whole, but with several stories within the main one, it's important that each of these also stands out - and they do.  These stories are expertly drawn out, and the tension is often palpable, even when the actual content is something as innocuous as watching a film about a man who wants to buy a hat.  Trust me - it's much more subtle than it sounds ;)

On finishing the book, my first thought was that it didn't quite grab me as much as Stone upon Stone.  The story meanders a lot, and I was constantly searching for the central thread, the elusive glue that holds it all together.  However, a week later, I'm still thinking about it (which is, of course, a good thing).  I suspect that this is a book which will benefit from rereading, one which only gives up its secrets slowly and unwillingly; the lack of an obvious plot may actually benefit the novel when it comes to be reread.  After all, what's important is not what we read, but how we remember it, a very different thing indeed:

"Besides, what is memory if not the pretense that you remember.  Though it's our only witness to having existed.  We depend on memory the way a forest depends on trees, a river on its banks.  More - if you ask me, we're created by memory.  Not just us, the whole world." (p.355)

Perhaps Myśliwski's chances of a BTBA repeat aren't that bad after all...

'Chasing the King of Hearts' by Hanna Krall (Review)

It's been a while, but I've finally got around to trying another of Peirene Press' two-hour slices of literary pleasure.  Today's offering is the first time the publisher has offered a Polish story, and while the background is a familiar one for most readers, the style is definitely a little different :)

*****
Hanna Krall's Chasing the King of Hearts (translated by Philip Boehm, review copy courtesy of the publisher) is mainly set in Poland during the last few years of the Second World War.  Izolda is a Polish Jew living in the Warsaw Ghetto, and with the writing on the wall, she decides that it's time to start thinking about escape.  On the very first page of the book, she meets fellow Jew Shayek, quickly falling in love with (then marrying) him, and this love is the catalyst for the events which follow.

If you think this sounds like another three-hankie piece of Holocaust Lit though, you'd be mistaken.  Chasing the King of Hearts is not one of those clichéd WW2 novels where the writer ratchets up the tension before playing on the reader's emotions with scenes of torture, death and betrayal.  Instead, Krall focuses on one woman and her quest to save the man she loves - the fact that there's a war going on is just a technicality...

Rather than being a traditional, seamless narrative, the book is divided into many short sections, each lasting a page or so.  This structure has the effect of eliminating dead time, whisking the reader (and Izolda) through the war years, almost without our realising how much time has passed.  Krall's laconic style also means that the horrors of the Holocaust are kept in the background, only very rarely surfacing, and there's a lot of dry humour:

"Izolda understands Lilusia's cunning, but then she takes a closer look at the handbag and sets it on the floor.  How's that?  Does the bag look Jewish there?  She tries the sofa, the stool, the chair.  Because if it does, what exactly about the bag is Jewish?"
p.21 (Peirene Press, 2013)

Even when matters do become a little more emotionally charged, the next section usually sweeps those feelings away - there's no time to dwell on the past here.

The title comes from the fortune-telling Izolda has an acquaintance do for her using a normal set of playing cards.  Shayek is the King of Hearts (Izolda, naturally is the Queen), and the chase takes place both within the deck and all across Europe, as Izolda does her best to keep tabs on her husband, hoping to alleviate his suffering and reunite with him one day.  In the process, she shows herself to be a formidable woman, brave, resourceful and inventive, someone who can always find a way to do the impossible.

Her greatest strength is her adaptability.  She's a woman who's prepared to do almost anything, crawling through sewers, smuggling contraband and marching in and out of the Ghetto, seemingly without blinking an eye.  Her brazenness is also breathtaking, able to lie through her teeth and smile when she's found out, allowing her to charm those who can be charmed and bribe those who can't.  In fact, she's a bit of a chameleon, and at times she begins to see herself as who she's pretending to be, rather than who she was:

"Her suffering is worse, because she is worse.  That's what the whole world thinks, and the whole world can't be wrong when it comes to a sense of good and bad, or rather, better and worse.
 She is worse and that's why she is in disguise.  She has a new name and a new hair colour and a new voice and laugh and a new way of carrying her handbag.  And she prefers her new self to the real thing.  So what does that mean?  That her disguised self... that her pretend self is better than her real self." (pp.55/6)

The key to the whole book though is that it is actually a romance.  From the very start, the reader is told that Izolda is madly in love with Shayek, and everything she does throughout Chasing the King of Hearts is done for him.  However, in the times she finds herself in, this attitude brings with it some moral dilemmas, for in investing so much in one man, Izolda may have to neglect other loved ones - and that neglect may have serious consequences.  Should she be devoting all her time, energy and money to helping Shayek, or would it be better to help the people around her?  It's a rather nasty dilemma to face...

There's a lot to like about the book, one that many people will enjoy.  It's an interesting, different look at a period which, having already been covered extensively, can sometimes leave novels feeling rather stale and old.  I liked it, even if I didn't really love it, and I felt that the short, fleeting sections were both the book's strength and its weakness.  While it kept the reader engaged, I felt that at times a little slipped between the cracks; I would have enjoyed it more if it had slowed down at times, just a little...

I did enjoy the way the book finished though, as we get to experience life after the war and find out what happened to Izolda and Shayek.  The last sections are poignant and force the reader to ask themselves if it was all really worth it, the sacrifices and the suffering.  While we're not sure what Izolda's answer would be, Chasing the King of Hearts is certainly worth the sacrifice of a couple of hours of your time :)

'Stone upon Stone' by Wiesław Myśliwski (Review)

After all the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize business was completed, I was planning to read the winner of the Best Translated Book Award, to see how the two laureates compared.  Of course, that idea was shelved when the BTBA winner turned out to be Satantango, a book I'd already reviewed...  Instead, I turned back to 2012, to see how last year's American choice matched up to the IFFP winner, Blooms of Darkness.  Seconds out, it's round two in the IFFP-BTBA duel of champions ;)

*****
Wiesław Myśliwski's Stone upon Stone (translated by Bill Johnston, published by Archipelago Books) is a hefty novel, but a surprisingly smooth read.  It consists of eight thematic chapters, all narrated by Szymek Pietruszka, an elderly farmer in the Polish provinces.  In effect, the book is a lengthy monologue, one in which Szymek tells stories about life, land and family - and he certainly knows how to tell a story...

From the initial tale of his struggles to find the time, money and materials to build a family tomb, Szymek takes us on a trip through time, recounting stories of his days in the Polish resistance during the Second World War.  While it's difficult to keep the narrator on a path free of digressions, the patient reader is eventually rewarded with more glimpses of what came between the end of the war and his current situation.  If Szymek appears to be a lonely old man stuck on a farm in the middle of nowhere, there are reasons for the way he has ended up.

Szymek is a man heading towards the end of his life, and his stories help us to see how society has progressed in his home country.  While modern comforts have made life a little easier, on the whole, Szymek thinks life has gone downhill since his youth.  The best example of this comes from the chapter 'The Road', where the newly-surfaced route through the village allows people to drive to neighbouring towns in comfort.  Unfortunately, the farmers now find it hard to get their horses and carriages across the road with the harvest (traffic lights were obviously a later invention...):

"There's no more peace to be had in our village.  Nothing but cars and cars and cars.  It's like they built the road for cars alone and forgot about the people.  But are there only cars living in the world?  Maybe a time'll come when there won't be any more people, only cars.  Then I hope the damn things'll kill each other.  I hope they have wars, worse than human wars.  I hope they hate each other and fight and curse each other.  Till one day maybe a Car God will appear, and it'll make him angry and he'll drown the lot of them."
pp.67/8 (Archipelago Books, 2010)

The narrator (and perhaps the writer) also feels uneasy about the loss of connection with the land.  In his father's day, the land was everything, coming before school, illness or hunger, and it was the farmer's duty to tend to it - man is short-lived, but the land goes on forever.  When the war starts, Szymek's father uses this as an excuse to try to stop his son leaving the farm:

"What do we have to fight about?  We plow and plant and mow, are we in anyone's way?  War won't change the world.  People'll just go off and kill each other, then afterwards it'll be the same as it was before.  And as usual it'll be us country folk that do most of the dying.  And nobody will even remember that we fought, or why.  Because when country folks die they don't leave monuments and books behind, only tears.  They rot in the land, and even the land doesn't remember them.  If the land was going to remember everyone it would have to stop giving birth to new life.  But the land's job is to give birth." (p.156)

However, now it is the land's duty to make man a profit, and the farmers follow whatever trend will make the most money in the shortest time, even if this has negative long-term consequences.  Fields are sown with unsuitable (but lucrative) crops, and liberal sprinklings of nitrates are used to increase yields.  Worst of all, the younger folk are abandoning their homes for the city, leaving the land to the mercy of the old and frail.

While the land plays an important role, the heart of the book is the enigmatic Szymek though, and it is his personal story which fascinates us.  Despite his measured, friendly tone, we gradually learn that he's not quite as nice as he may appear at first glance.  He's a drinker, a fighter, a user of women, a man we shouldn't really warm to.  He's a charismatic old bloke though, and he does have redeeming features (quite apart from his war hero status) and the more we learn, the more we understand about why he grew up that way, and why he is still alone...

Stone Upon Stone is an excellent read, and a fairly easy one at that.  I wolfed it down in four days (not bad for around 560 pages), and that is due in part to the fairly simple language used in the book.  In the excellent interview with Scott Esposito (available as a Two Voices podcast), Bill Johnston talks about how the key to translating the book into English was finding the right way to bring Szymek's voice across into the new language.  His solution was to avoid complex Latin-based words, sticking with simpler Germanic-based vocabulary.  Whether that's the reason for the success or not, the voice definitely works.

Whether you're interested in twentieth-century Poland or just a sucker for a good story, this is a book for you.  Szymek's rambling tales, with digression following digression until the chapter (and, eventually, the whole book) comes full circle, are entertaining and thought-provoking, whether they are stories of joyous drunken rampages or suspense-filled moments in the cold, Polish forests, waiting for the enemy to appear.  In the end, it's a book about life - but one, that begins, and ends, with the inescapable image of a tomb...

...that is, if he can get the cement.

*****
In terms of BTBA v IFFP then, I'd have to say that the score is 2-0 to the American prize.  While the 2013 contest was a close one, with Satantango just edging out The Detour in a battle of very, very different styles (Krasznahorkai's never-ending sentences against Bakker's stripped-back prose), the 2012 bout was a no-contest.  I have made no secret of the fact that Aharon Appelfeld's Blooms of Darkness was one of my least favourite books on the 2012 IFFP shortlist, and Stone Upon Stone is simply a far better novel.

I quite like the idea of a transatlantic translation showdown - watch out for more BTBA-IFFP battles in the future ;)

'Mother Departs' by Tadeusz Różewicz (Review)

Stork Press is a relatively new London-based publisher, one with an eastern-European slant, but focusing particularly on Polish books (the name is a very Polish one!).  So far, they have published in several genres, and the first book to really catch my eye was the winner of the 2000 Nike Prize (the Polish Booker).  It's by a famous poet, but, as we'll see, it's actually more of a family affair...

*****
Tadeusz Różewicz's Mother Departs (translated by Barbara Bogoczek, review copy courtesy of the publisher) is a short book, encompassing several different styles of writing.  There are some childhood reminiscences, short poems, diary entries, prose fragments... a bit of everything really.

It's also fragmented in another way.  While Tadeusz is the writer of the family, Mother Departs features the joint efforts of four family members: Tadeusz; his mother, Stefania; his younger brother, Stanisław; and his older brother, Janusz, a member of the Polish resistance who was executed in 1944.  Interspersed throughout the writing are family photos, many of which feature the focus of the collection, Stefania.  Despite their variety, all the pieces circle the topic of the mother (either abstractly or concretely)

In the first couple of pieces, Stefania describes the village she grew up in, sketching a picture of the lives of the farming labourers.  Their abject poverty (and their poor hygiene and diet) is set against the traditional celebrations for holidays and weddings, and a dependence on superstition. This was the time of partition, where the village fell under Russian rule.  While the middle classes seethe though, the peasants aren't particularly bothered by foreign rule - provided the Tsar helps to supply them with more food...

The next section sees Tadeusz take over with short, plain poems, mostly about mothers and grief.  In 'dead fruit', we see a mother grieving her dead son:

"The poor mother steps across the room
 adjusts the photograph and cries

 The gold suns on the table darken
 as does the dead fruit of her life" 
p.42 (Stork Press, 2013)

When we know what happened to Janusz (and the excellent introduction gives a detailed account of Różewicz's family history), the poems take on a more solemn, personal tinge.

While Różewicz is known as a poet, I much preferred the prose fragments.  One of my favourites, 'Red Stamps', a story of around 150 words, describes the visit of a bailiff who has come to decide which household items are to be confiscated to pay off debts:

"It was not until my brother and I crept into the creaking bed and hid our heads under the thick eiderdown that we dared speak out loud.  We prayed for a miracle.
But in the cold light of the morning, five red stamps bled like five wounds." (p.69)

It's an excellent story, evoking powerful images of a stressful event - I suppose you could even call it flash fiction...

Perhaps the pivotal section of the book, 'Gliwice Diary' is an honest, weary account of the last few months of Tadeusz's mother's life.  As he struggles to come to terms with her inevitable death (and, at the same time, cope with the recent death of close friend Leopold Staff), he recounts his inability to focus on his writing, and the suffering his mother endures over the final days of her life.  Ostracised by the mainstream literary society in Poland (for political reasons...), he finds himself trying to justify his methods:

"What the 'critical' or 'literary' fraternity labelled 'repetition'... - 'Tadeusz R. keeps repeating himself', they said - was and possibly still is the most valuable thing in my work.  The dogged reworking, repeating, returning to the same matter, and so on... to the very end.  Other things will get written by somebody else.  There is no alternative.  Or you end up with literary chit chat." (p.88)

Grieving a close friend, preparing for a life without his mother and struggling to carry on with his work - it's a lot to take for a young man.  At the time he was 36, a couple of years younger than I am now...

The collection ends with contributions from Tadeusz's two brothers.  Janusz's piece is a fragment from a man whose life was cut tragically short, a short description of coming home from school to his waiting mother. Stanisław's is a childhood memoir, again with a central focus on his mother.  Together, the assorted texts form both a portrait of, and a homage to, a woman - but also to a country and a time.  You see, as much as it talks about Stefania, Mother Departs talks to the reader about a shared past.  It's easy to see why it won the Nike Prize - it's not so much the private memories of a mother, as a collective, nostalgic look at what has been lost.

While I'm not a big fan of the poetry here, the collection as a whole works surprisingly well.  Bogoczek's translation is very smooth, with no obvious clumsiness (to my British eye, anyway!), and it's a book which you can dip into when the mood strikes.  I'd have to take task with the publisher over one thing though - I'm not sure you could claim that this was by Różewicz.  This work is most definitely a collaborative effort - or, as I said above, a family affair :)

There's No Place Like Home

While my recent literary travels have mainly taken me to Iceland, today we're visiting another northern European country by the sea.  Poland may not be quite as chilly as Iceland, but as you can tell by the title of today's book, Paweł Huelle's Cold Sea Stories, it has its fair share of less temperate days.  This book is the latest in Comma Press' series of European short story collections, an excellent selection of stories, mostly based in and around the author's home town of Gdańsk - however, when you look beneath the surface, there's a lot more connecting them than that...

*****
Cold Sea Stories (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) is full of personal touches from the writer's life.  In The Bicycle Express, we follow a young student and his friend as they ride around Gdańsk delivering newspapers with the latest news from striking workers - among them, a certain Lech Wałęsa...  One of the shorter tales, Depka and Rzepka, is about a young boy charged with a trip to some fishermen to obtain some fish for Christmas, something which was almost impossible to do in the city's shops.  Both of these stories, as the writer admits, are highly autobiographical, memories adapted for this collection.

Many of the stories though are a little more abstract than this.  In fact, several contain elements of that much-used expression 'magical realism', allowing Huelle to soar above the constraints of the cold north to explore his themes.  Two stories with several parallels are Doctor Cheng and Ukiel, both of which deal with men returning to their home town after decades abroad, looking for an answer to the sadness in their lives and failing to find it in the dull, little-changed place they left behind.  Having lost partners, they are searching for something to keep them going - in different ways, the two stories give glimpses of something worth waiting for...

However, the host of returning travellers in Cold Sea Stories seem largely doomed to disappointment.  While the political system may have changed, the pessimistic view pervading many of the stories is that everything else has stayed the same.  On arriving in Poland, many of the characters find that they have little connection to their country of birth, and soon regret their decision to return.  An example from Doctor Cheng:

"Only on the plane did it dawn on him that the decision to make this journey, taken a good fifteen months ago, was a reckless one.  Nothing really drew him to the country where he had spent the first twenty years of his life and which had no positive associations for him." p.93
(Comma Press, 2012)

Despite this, the protagonists are unable to escape a sense of nostalgia which pulls them back to their homeland.  In several of the stories, the central character is stopped dead in their tracks by a sudden association, a memory or (more often) by a smell, a fragrance of flowers.  Most of the stories contain frustrating elements of missing something from the past but being unable to retrieve it.  In Abulafia, a boy laments the loss of a language, one he had never learnt:

"And a month later his mother, [died] from pneumonia.  She took her greatest secret with her; the language she had never passed on to him, which would always bring him the scent of haymaking, clover, a wind from the sea and clouds." p.122

Perhaps the most memorable stories in the collection are the two that bookend it.  The first, Mimesis, at 41 pages the longest of the stories, is set in a deserted village towards the end of the Second World War and explores the relationship between a freed prisoner of war and a young mute woman left behind when the Germans took the rest of the village people.  First Summer, the last of the stories, then returns to the same town in more recent times and looks at what has become of the setting for the first story.  There are other connections between the two stories than the town though - and I'll leave you to find them out for yourself ;)

I read Cold Sea Stories twice, and I got a lot more out of it the second time.  There are connections between the stories which only became apparent on a rereading, and I'm sure that there's still a lot that I haven't managed to tease out.  Luckily, the publisher has come to the reader's aid a little here, as there is a brief Q & A between the translator and writer included at the end of the book, giving brief details as to the creation and meaning of each of the stories.  I was recently discussing this need for supplementary information (introductions, cultural explanations) in works of translated fiction with some other bloggers, and this is a good example of the kind of information which adds value (and interest!) to a book.

In the end though, it's all about the stories, and when you have a collection of good ones, you can't go far wrong.  There's nothing particularly earth-shattering about them - no great surprises or shocking twists - , but then a good story doesn't really need that; we all have stories to tell, no matter how mundane.

"There is always a story to be told... even if a person spends his whole life sitting in one room staring out of the same window all the time." p.158 (Franz Carl Weber)

If You Could See The Light

I have been married for just over seven years now to a lovely, long-suffering woman who originally comes from Poland - which makes the fact that that I have somehow neglected to read even one Polish book over the three-and-a-half years of my blog even more of a travesty than it already is.  Luckily, that barren streak has come to an end thanks to receiving an e-copy of Andrzej Stasiuk's Dukla (translated by Bill Johnston) from Dalkey Archive Press - and a very fine book it is too :)

*****

To call Dukla a novel though would be something of a stretch.  It consists of a sort of prologue, the three-part novella which gives the collection its name (one which makes up the bulk of the work) and a smattering of brief vignettes to complete the book.  With such a diverse offering of styles and genres, it's unsurprising that the reader can be a little unsettled by Dukla, but this is far from being its only unorthodox feature.

If you're looking for a plot, or a unifying storyline, I can save you the time - there isn't one.  But don't just take my word for it; Stasiuk himself admits as much right at the start:

 "There won't be any plot, there won't be any story..." p.4

A couple of pages later, he reinforces his promise, saying:

"There'll be no plot, with its promise of a beginning and hope of an end.  A plot is the remission of sins, the mother of fools, but it melts away in the rising light of the day.  Darkness or blindness give things meaning, when the mind has to seek out a way in the shadows, providing its own light." p.6-7

It really doesn't get any less ambiguous than that...

Of course, there is some sort of cohesion to the text, and it is Dukla, a small town in the south of Poland, which supplies it.  In the first section, the narrator, a very thinly-disguised version of the writer, is on one of his regular pilgrimages to the small country town, a place which continually draws him back in a quest for something elusive and unidentifiable.  As we move into the main section of Dukla, we are given hints of what brings him back year after year, echoes of the past, images of searing summers and frosty winters...

...and, as hinted at in the quotation above, these images are what Stasiuk is interested in.  Rather than concerning himself with the lives of people living in the countryside, the writer is fascinated only by what he sees, what he really sees, the visions created by the interplay of light with objects.  He says:

"For a long time now it's seemed to me that the only thing worth describing is light, its variations and its eternal nature.  Actions interest me to a much lesser degree." p.22

Dukla certainly lives up to that intention.  Stasiuk describes the effects of light and shadow superbly, making you feel the warmth under the shade of the trees and the chill of the snow in the fields.  By recounting merely what is observed, ignoring what the mind thinks lies beneath the surface, objects are rendered unreal, created only by our perception.  And if what we see can be altered simply by different levels of light, Stasiuk seems to be implying that believing what we see may not be quite as straight-forward as many of us think:

"White, silver and black entered into subtle combinations with one another, thus placing reality under a question mark.  And if not reality, then at least the purpose and meaning of perception." p.171

The people of Dukla, as you can deduce from what the writer says about his interest in writing the novel, are merely background noises, or rather images.  They contribute nothing more to the story than the buildings radiating heat in the afternoon, or the cows aimlessly wandering across the dazzling green fields.  People slip in and out of scenes, or merely sit quietly in dusty, airless cafés - they are objects, not beings:

"People leaked from their houses drop by drop, rolled from entranceways like ponderous balls..." p.43

"People were lying on the shore as if the waves had thrown them there." p.44

This gives the book a rather unusual, otherworldly feel, creating a sense of distance between the reader and the setting - all the better for us to analyse the effect of the light, I suppose...

As much as it is a work about light though, Dukla is also one which deals with the concept of memory.  I'm probably not the first reviewer to use the word 'Proustian' in connection with Stasiuk's writing, but it is a description which comes easily to mind when meandering through the narrator's languid, unhurried descriptions of his earlier visits.  Smells and shadows evoke memories of the past, and he seems caught in those moments, always hoping to squeeze something more from the mental images he pores over.  Perhaps this obsession with the town is an attempt to process events from his youth, a way of reconnecting with his younger self...  In any case, it makes for beautiful writing :)

It is extremely difficult to sum up Dukla; the book (rather like this review) appears to be without coherence at times, a meandering stream of reminiscence which relies on a good-natured reader with time on their hands.  Despite the lack of any real story though, it is a wonderful book, one I'm very glad to have read.  There's something very Japanese about the foregrounding of language over plot, and one book it reminds me of a lot is Natsume Soseki's Kusamakura, another poetic story of a lazy summer in search of lost times.  Those who know me will realise that this is a very good thing...

I'll leave the last word to the writer though.  If you were wondering about the choice of the title, Dukla, as well as being the name of a town in the Polish countryside, is actually a real word:

"In the dictionary it says "dukla" means "a small mineshaft dug for exploratory purposes, in search of deposits, for ventilation, or as a primitive means of extracting ore."  That's right.  My method is primitive.  It's like drilling at random." p.60

I would strongly advise you all to read Dukla and judge Stasiuk's method for yourselves...