At the beginning, there is the longing of a child to be simultaneously here and elsewhere. It is appeased in traveling and reading.
At the beginning, there is the longing of a child to be simultaneously here and elsewhere. It is appeased in traveling and reading.
Impressions from Central Europe, a metaphor of the ›variety of worlds‹: a medial cosmos here, the disposability of each and every possible information, a fallen into decay sanatorium there, a ›galician magic mountain‹.
Andrzej Stasiuk's essays and autobiographic album is not only a mirrot of authors – such as his preferred ones: Beckett, Hrbal and Platonow –, books and films; but also of the celebrated Polish author as a lucid and independent critic of our contemporary times. Road maps of all kinds and the actual world before our window - this is all he needs to sharpen the perception of contemporary phenomena: the impaired signification of death, the religious surrogates of mass culture, the new boundlessness and nevertheless the paradox of the loss of our sensitivity.
There is a certain melancholy about Stasiuk while he depicts the loss of secrecy in out completely illuminated (or so it seems) world, marked by the omnipresence of the visual. And he recalls the magic of a childhood photography, which may once preserve us from the last, the most awesome solitude. Then, only a cardboard airplance might bring us to heaven.
Andrzej Stasiuk, born in Warsaw in 1960, has been living in the Beskides since 1986. He writes poems, stories, novels, also works as a journalist and scriptwriter and together with his wife Monika Sznajderman directs the publishing house Czarne located in Wolowiec. He has received numerous literary awards, among them the Samuel Bogumil Linde Prize for Literature (2002), the Nike Prize (Poland, 2005) for Jadąc do Babadag, the Adalbert Stifter Prize (2005), the Vilenica Prize and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2016).
Andrzej Stasiuk, born in Warsaw in 1960, has been living in the Beskides since 1986. He writes poems, stories, novels, also works as a...
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