The Polish Complex (1977)

In The Polish Complex, Konwicki mixes the surreal and fantastic with grey Communist Warsaw and the result in an involving, melancholy, odd read. The main plot follows an author named Konwicki who is standing in line at a jewelry store on Christmas Eve. It becomes increasingly clear that the delivery to the store is never going to happen but the group in line finds it hard to leave. There’s a lot of aimless conversations – about the characters’ dull lives, plans that might never happen – that occasionally turn charged. Konwicki as well as a couple of the others allude to their time as Polish partisans during WWII. The surreal elements are often set out in separate stream-of-consciousness thoughts of the narrator, a flashback to the past or a letter but they also enter the main story. There’s some ambiguity about the author’s relation to some of the other characters – was one of the other line-dwellers assigned to kill him? Is the shopgirl his guardian angel?

The setting of a line and the dully grey background would be a recognizably Communist one. Everyone is waiting for something besides the jewelry shipment – for a trip that is talked about but might never come, for the supposed happy Communist future that no one believes in anymore, for Polish independence in the 19th c and for the end of an anonymous regime in a letter to Konwicki. Sometimes the talk can get a little pointless but Konwicki mixes the gloom with some fantastic inventions. The narrator occasionally thinks about role of the writer, the fate of nations and moves out all the way to the indifferent spinning earth in his long, elaborate stream-of-consciousness head monologues, a change of pace in both prose style and scope from the main plot. He has one extended story of a leader of the failed Polish rebellion in 1863 which is compared to the Polish partisans. I wasn’t sure if the author was basing this on a real character and was unfamiliar with the history of that time but the story was involving anyway. Another sideplot is the letter to Konwicki by a Polish friend now living in an unnamed country. His friend bemoans the sad state of their government, which clamps down on freedom and forces everyone to publicly state their love of the party. The friend sadly compares his life to the freedom that he assumes is in Poland, a bit of roundabout criticism by the author. ( )