A niche, tiny novelette about a city, or the idea of cities. The whole narrative is made up of the kind of wide-angle description of place, or of people in the collective, which in conventional novels precedes a zoom in towards named human characters. The reflex to anticipate imminent character and story throughout the book made this the reading equivalent of hearing one of those music tracks that seems to be wholly made up of introductions. The book's intense, sometimes metaphysical, involvement with city as organic entity, its use of the passive voice, and its panoramas of people as types and generalities, often reminded me of descriptive passages in the London psychogeographies of Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair.
Several other posters have described Dreams and Stones as prose-poetry. To me, this is unquestionably prose, no more poetic than that of many good novelists, but there is poetic licence here in repurposing facts and ideas to transmit the feel of something, rather than making analogies which are strictly factually correct. This brought to mind the quibbles several reviewers had with inaccurate 'information' mentioned in this year's Booker International winner Flights by Tulli's fellow Pole, Olga Tokarczuk.
The first of two parts (about 1/3 of Dreams and Stones) appears to be focused on an ideal city (and the endeavours to suppress darker sides dubbed 'the countercity'), and the Soviet Communist idea of the perfectibility of man. The narrative feels orderly by comparison with the second part, and while reading it, I frequently imagined Soviet-style propaganda posters, and similar images from Andrzej Wajda's Man of Marble - although ultimately that orderliness begins to fray into chaos.
The second part seems somewhat more fluid, emotive and diffuse, and uses the imagery of the kaleidoscope and its crystals to connect scenes. Some are scenes of the book's 'home' city (evidently Warsaw - identifiable by the mentions of the letters W and A in its name, and a palace with a spire that is disliked by residents, i.e. the Soviet-built Pałac Kultury) - and there are also series of caricature images of other cities, in Western Europe and North America, and in Russia. (The well-intentioned use of regional and national stereotypes felt to me not unlike that of American children's author Richard Scarry.) Perhaps some of these arrays of foreign cities can be seen as a post-Communist opening-up to the world - the book was published in 1995 - while the places themselves still remain relatively unreal as many Poles would not yet have travelled a great deal.
These cartoonish images of cities abroad are the main source of humour in a largely serious-minded, sometimes ethereal book:
Is it possible that Paris really exists – a place with a name so pretentious it makes one laugh? Or London, which was essentially conceived as fog? Manchester and Liverpool are two soccer fields with coal tips instead of stands. Bordeaux is a mountain in the shape of a bottle; Rotterdam, Antwerp and the Hague are the names of flea-ridden sailing ships rocking against the quay, their holds filled with spices and silk. Venice is in reality a mother-of-pearl gondola in which is concealed a music box. Chicago is a place filled with suitcases of money where gangsters in felt hats live, shoot guns and die. New York crammed the tallest skyscrapers in the world into an area six inches long and four and a half wide; on the other side there is a box for a postage stamp.
Knowing less about provincial Russia, I was intrigued by the following:
They began to wander aimlessly about St. Petersburg, great in its golden frame, where beneath the shiny varnish it is dark in the winter for as much as twenty hours a day. Or Moscow, where the streets were paved with wood that may have been real or may have been made from lacquered building blocks. They even traveled as far as Tula, which was tall and had a brass tap to let out boiling water, and also to Omsk and Tomsk, where in the summertime they float wood down the river and in winter they are chilled to the marrow. And to Astrakhan – that storehouse of ice and skins – where caviar is eaten by the spoonful and champagne drunk straight from the bottle. At the feet of a good few of these lost travelers, somewhere at the meeting point of steppe and sea there opened up a dark abyss by the name of Odessa, filled with sailors, bandits, officers and femmes fatales, washed over beyond salvation by waves of epidemics and filled forever with the echo of shots. Some did not stop till Baku, where blood flows like rainwater in the streets, or Khabarovsk, where White Army soldiers without boots lie on the white snow. Or Vladivostok, that last station in the world, toward which tracks that previously ran straight as an arrow begin to describe the first loop of a spiral. The next loop rests on Harbin, where Chinese in felt shoes wade through snowdrifts..
The connections between different scenes and themes is always beautifully done, and everything flowed seamlessly. This second section sometimes toys with physics concepts prevalent in 90s pop-culture, like the butterfly effect and parallel universes, with an intent that is evidently poetic rather than scientific.
This is clearly not a book for everyone, as it has neither human characters nor plot in a remotely conventional sense, but it is very short (likely taking under 2 hours for many literary fiction readers) and if you enjoy films of time-lapse photography and panoramic scenes, or extended god's-eye-view descriptions of cities, you may like it.
This was the first book I've read by contemporary Polish author Magdalena Tulli. Archipelago Press, and top-notch translator Bill Johnson are fans of hers and have published several of her works in English. Her books appear inviting as very quick reads, given their brevity, but this one seems typical in being experimental and idea-driven (and so only quick at times when one is alert and up for reading that sort of thing).
(read and reviewed Oct 2018; the review on Goodreads)
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