Synopses & Reviews
Andrzej Stasiuk is a restless and indefatigable traveler. His journeys take him from his native Poland to Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine. By car, train, bus, ferry. To small towns and villages with unfamiliar-sounding yet strangely evocative names. "The heart of my Europe," Stasiuk tells us, "beats in Sokolow, Podlaski, and in Husi, not in Vienna."
Where did Moldova end and Transylvania begin, he wonders as he is being driven at breakneck speed in an ancient Audi — loose wires hanging from the dashboard — by a driver in shorts and bare feet, a cross swinging on his chest. In Comrat, a funeral procession moves slowly down the main street, the open coffin on a pickup truck, an old woman dressed in black brushing away the flies above the face of the deceased. On to Soroca, a baroque-Byzantine-Tatar-Turkish encampment, to meet Gypsies. And all the way to Babadag, between the Baltic Coast and the Black Sea, where Stasiuk sees his first minaret, "simple and severe, a pencil pointed at the sky."
A brilliant tour of Europe's dark underside — travel writing at its very best.
Review
PRAISE FOR NINE"It is not at all a stretch to say that Andrzej Stasiuk is to Eastern European literature what Borges and Márquez are to the literatures of South America: a voice of unique, transcendent quality and supra-regional permanence."THE ABSINTHE LITERARY REVIEW
"In Nine, Stasiuk returns to the city of his birth, and with stunning results."FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG (Germany)
Review
"The technique is masterly, and the carefully calibrated atmosphere of dread and threat beautifully sustained."
Review
"In 1846, when Jacub Szela first ascended as a Polish leader, he guided a ragtag mob of peasants and serfs in a fight against their landowners and gentry. Szela had been anointed "king of the peasants" for 24 hours by the ruling Austrian empire, and in that time he raised an army, running into taverns with the cry, "Get to work, boys, and hurry, for time passes." Those men would slaughter almost 1,000 noblemen in their quest for economic freedom. Szela and his followers came to a bad end (as uprisings of these sorts tend to do). More than a century and a half later, writer Andrzej Stasiuk now sits in a dusty co-op on Szela's old stomping grounds in Vicsani -- which are once again filled with the poor and powerless drinking their vodka and pear brandy -- imagining the second-coming of the rebel leader. The land here may still be full of the poor and oppressed, but missing now are the oppressors to direct their fury against. Stasiuk, a Pole himself, addresses this frustration to his dead countryman: 'There's no one for you to go after... The most you could do is go to Suceava and like a postindustrial Luddite smash a sky-blue ATM.'" Jessa Crispin, NPR (Read the entire NPR review)
Synopsis
A collection of travel narratives from Central and Eastern Europe by award-winning Polish author Andrzej Stasiuk.
Synopsis
PRAISE FOR
NINE:
"An accomplished stylist with an eye for telling detail . . . I caught a flavor of Hamsun, Sartre, Genet, and Kafka in Stasiuks scalpel-like but evocative writing." —Irvine Welsh, New York Times Book Review
"Stasiuk takes us into parts of Polish and post-Communist life whose day-to-day realities we might not have otherwise imagined." —Eva Hoffman, New York Review of Books
"A kaleidoscopic view of Warsaw in transition and in chaos, following the collapse of Communism . . . The technique is masterly, and the carefully calibrated atmosphere of dread and threat beautifully sustained." —Kirkus Reviews
"A sobering vision of the new face of central Europe in a narrative that is at once hallucinatory, haunting, and abject." —Publishers Weekly (starred)
"Nine stinks like cheap cigarettes and tastes like a busted lip but is tenderly observant and elegantly translated." —Booklist
Synopsis
Pawel, a young businessman in debt to loan sharks, wakes up one April morning in a sea of debris, broken glass, ripped upholstery, and clothes spilling out of the wardrobe. He turns to two friends for help: Bolek, a former coal miner, now a drug dealer who lives in tasteless luxury; and Jacek, an addict, who is himself on the run through Warsaw, a washed-out city, a hostile landscape of apartment blocks, railroad stations, wild gardens, factories, and suburban wastelands.In this novel Andrzej Stasiuk portrays a generation of Poles, freed from outdated ideologies but left feeling adrift and disconnected from family, neighbors, and friends. At once existential crime fiction and a work of art, Nine establishes Stasiuk as a major voice in European literature.
About the Author
Born in Warsaw in 1960, ANDRZEJ STASIUK is the author of five novels and a collection of essays, Fado (2009). On the Road to Babadag won the prestigious Nike Award on its original publication in Poland in 2005.
Table of Contents
Contents
That Fear 1
The Slovak Two Hundred 7
Rasinari 19
Our Leader 32
Description of a Journey through
East Hungary to Ukraine 46
Baia Mare 63
Tara Secuilor, Szand#233;kelyfand#246;ld, Szeklerland 68
The Country in Which the War Began 77
Shqiperia 89
Moldova 109
The Ferry to Galati 133
Pitching Oneand#8217;s Tent in a New Place 140
Delta 145
On the Road to Babadag 167
Notes 253