Dukla

Andrzej Stasiuk writes:

It's Sunday and people are still asleep, that's why this story ought to lack a plot, because no one thing can cover up other things, when we're headed toward nothingness, toward the realization that the world is merely a momentary obstacle in the free passage of light.

and:

So I decided to try and find the house that R. and I had discovered when we were here in the summer. At that time dusk had been falling. We walked down Cergowska, turned into Podwale, then into Zielona. It was an inconspicuous cottage of blackened wood. It stood at the far end of an untended yard. A yellow light shone in the window. Five minutes later and everything would have been completely dark, but the remains of daylight allowed us to take a show more look at this yard or lot. It was laid out in a truly curious order. Scraps, pieces, and torn lengths of rusty sheet metal had been arranged in a tidy geometrical pile. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to organize the misshapen pieces into an almost perfect cuboid. Everywhere, rocks, rubble, and brick fragments lay in a pyramidal prism smoothed into an exact cone. Shards and pebbles had been stuck in the crevices between the larger pieces as precisely as a mason would have done. Whole and half bricks had been ordered in a neat hexagonal stack. In another place, leftover roofing paper and plastic sheeting had been gathered together, rolled up and aligned according to type and size. The tubes and rolls had been placed so neatly upon one another in a tapering pile that on the top there was one roll crowning the whole. Wood too had been sorted according to size and shape. Rotten planks in one place, short lengths of thick beams elsewhere in a cubic mound, like building blocks. Next to them lay scrap iron. A snarl of rusted shapes had been disentangled. To one side pipes, rods, rails, channel bars, in other words long thin objects; to another small irregular polyhedrons, old bicycle parts, kitchen fittings, tin cans, and God knows what else. These items, whose shape prevented them from matching one another, had been tipped together to form a rounded semicircle heap, care being taken to make sure nothing jutted out to spoil the relatively even outline. Beneath the overhang of a shed built of sawmill offcuts, glass had been collected. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of bottles had been stacked on one another to form a wall of glass, necks toward the shed, bottoms facing out. Here too a rudimentary order had been maintained. Green, brown and clear glass were each kept together, in addition to which the bottles had been grouped according to size and shape: flat ones were separate from round ones, while half-liter bottles were not mixed with quarter liters, or with one-liter cola or orangeade bottles. The scheme was exceedingly complex, since three colors and multiple shapes give a dizzying number of possible combinations. Then there were jars, also sorted according to their dimensions. A little father still was an old tree with spreading branches, from which there hung loops of string, coils of electric cord, small and large lengths, and snippets, tied together, fastened tight, solid, dangling like horses’ tails. There were also stuffed plastic bags, over a dozen colored sacks filled with who knew what, but certainly something light, because they swung in the breeze. It looked like the creation of the world. A path had been trodden through the heaps of trash. It looked as if the creator of this order strolled around his work, admiring it, straightening it up from time to time.

We went toward the ruins of the synagogue. Birch saplings had taken root in the top of a wall several feet above the ground. We could hear the rustle of young leaves. At this point R. said he really liked the place we’d seen, that the person in that wretched old shack, the worst house on a whole street of big, expensive, ugly houses, that that person was just trying to give meaning to his world, and that was fine, he wasn’t trying to change it, just put it in order a little, the way you organize your thoughts, and often that’s enough to stop you from going mad. That was what R. said, so I gave up on the idea of creation, because it seemed like R. was right. show less

Couldn't finish this, despite several weeks of intermittent efforts. The author, Andrzej Stasiuk, is attempting to write photographic images of the town Dukla as the narrator experiences and remembers it in 1996. The book, its narrator says, is about light and time. It isn't driven by plot, and the episodes don't accumulate into a coherent memory of the past.

Fair enough, and exactly on some of my own interests. The problem is that, in this translation at least, Stasiuk isn't a good writer. The problems begin immediately. The book opens with this line:

"At four in the morning the night slowly raises its dark backside as if it were getting up from a heavy dinner and going to bed."

Is "backside" "back," in North American usage, or is it show more "bum," in UK usage? Either way, it's an odd word and an indigestible image. It's faintly Rabelaisian, slightly awkward, a bit absurd, somewhat comic, and somewhat rude. As a reader I don't mind being challenged in this way, provided the author intends me to be thrown off by such an odd opening image. The proof that it's intentional should come in the next few pages, where I'd expect echoes of the humor, the Rabelaisian body imagery, or some such ironic misuse of the sublime.

But the very next line belongs to en entirely different mode, a kind of photographic lyric:

"The air's like cold ink, it flows along the road surfaces, spills to each side and congeals into black lakes."

This is lyric realism, worlds away from "backsides," but we're not given a way to understand the bridge between the two. The opening pages and chapters repeat this sort of problem. On p. 6 there's this mixed image:

"The sky is bursting with the glow, but it remains trapped inside itself like air in a child's balloon."

That's not something I can visualize: it punctures the serious sublime with a playful metaphor: and yet the context isn't playful, it's plangent and lyrical. One more example, among hundreds:

"The hills, houses, water, clouds all had the distinctness of a supernatural photograph." (p. 9)

This is again photograph imagery, and it's easy to imagine. But then the next sentence is:

"In a landscape like that, thoughts sound like mechanical music."

That doesn't fit with the sentence before, but it also doesn't make a comprehensible contrast. And it isn't a metaphor I can understand. Then the next sentence:

"You can watch them, listen to them, but their meaning is always ominous, like echoes in a well."

Is mechanical music like echoes in a well? Are thoughts in "supernatural" landscapes like either?

I won't go on, even though my copy is marked up until p. 105, when I gave up. I can understand Stasiuk's intentions, and the affect of memory is sometimes very strong. He wants to recapture some intense feelings he's had looking at deserted landscapes and thinking of his childhood. Mainly he is preoccupied with capturing some intense visual memories of a kind of oppressive absence which is nevertheless a plenary presence. I understand that, and I can feel its effect on his images: it presses his metaphors into some very strange shapes. Sometimes he tries hard, repeatedly, to capture that mood, and the result, as Damian Kelleher writes, can be "tiresome." (reviews.media-culture.org.au/) But it's a boredom I would be happy to accommodate if I thought that Stasiuk was aware of the effects of his attempts as writing.

The problem is that he is content to leave each trope as he finds it. Writing has to be more than that: the strangeness of an impression does not always find its way into an equal strangeness of writing. Images like these need to be written down, but then they need to be remade as writing. show less

I read this a while ago, and not much has stuck with me, except for the feeling, as I was reading a different Polish novel about one small town, that I had recently read a Polish novel about a small town, which used an interesting form. That's not a great sign for this one, and the other novel (Olga Tokarczuk's 'House of Day, House of Night') was far superior in almost every way: better written, does a bit more with the compendium form, more memorable, less sub-undergraduate philosophising.

Il viandante: Solo adesso mi accorgo quanto sono scortese nei tuoi confronti, mia cara ombra: non ho ancor neppure fatto parola su quanto mi rallegro di ascoltarti, e non solo di vederti.
Lo sai, io amo l’ombra come amo la luce.
Perché esistano la bellezza del volto, la chiarezza del discorso, la bontà e fermezza del carattere, l’ombra è necessaria quanto la luce.
Esse non sono avversarie: anzi si tengono amorevolmente per mano, e quando la luce scompare, l’ombra le scivola dietro.
(Nietzsche, Umano troppo umano II)

I migliori tra i racconti brevi: Pioggia e Notte.

...perché il tempo è il rovescio dello spazio e attraverso le sue tende le cose si vedono ancora più nitide, se non altro perché non le si potrà toccare mai show more più.
(19)

E dunque Dukla come memento, come buco mentale nell'anima, chiave impossibile da duplicare e spirito coperto dalle piume scintillanti della realtà.
(89)

Provo a immaginare il mondo prima della fotografia e non ci riesco. Probabilmente il mondo non esisteva affatto, scompariva ininterrottamente, inghiottito dagli insaziabili sensi in movimento, e non ne rimaneva niente.
(110)

Quando di notte soffia il vento, l'oscurità si muove e i suoni possiedono una loro forma, che non si vede, ma che entra nelle orecchie come un oggetto materiale.
(139) show less