This short Polish autofiction was longlisted for the 2017 Booker International Prize, although I had wanted to read it since I first heard of it the previous year.
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Wioletta Greg's writing owes a fair bit to Bruno Schulz… but Schulz's stories are wonderful and so is this: often charming and adorable, yet with dark currents running through it. It's not quite so verbally acrobatic, but still full of enthralling descriptions of the narrator's eccentric family, and life at home and in the immediate environs. I'm guessing native readers of Polish might be more used to this sort of thing, given Schulz's centrality to literature in Poland. Olga Tokarczuk said in a recent interview [I wrote most of this post in late October or early November, just after I read the book] he "raised the Polish language to a completely different level. I love him but I also hate him because there’s no way to compete with him. He’s the genius of the Polish language."
But, as an English-language reader who has nowhere near exhausted what's available in translation from Poland, this Schulz-influenced style delightful and novel. I was already predisposed to be interested the book, being near the author's age and having heritage from the south of Poland, but the style of writing on top of that made it one of my favourite reads of the year. Any cultural references were a joy to look up, knowing they were things I'd have also heard of in childhood had I lived in, or maybe just spent more time in Poland myself; I recognised a few items as souvenirs, and I felt nervous on Wiola's behalf when she submitted an unintentionally-suspicious painting to a Communist children's art competition.
Whether this small semi-autobiographical book is a novella in sequential snapshots (I prefer to see it that way) or a short story collection, it shares something else with Schultz's first collection. Both volumes have delicious, appetising titles in Polish that reflect the almost edible quality of the cosiest and most beautiful moments of the narrative, but in English, have been retitled in a way that suggests something horrorish. Cinnamon Shops v The Street of Crocodiles; Unripe Fruit v Swallowing Mercury. I would say inexplicably, except that I'd guess English-language publishers of the 1960s thought Cinnamon Shops sounded girly or Christmassy, where they saw the market for East European literature as masculine and serious, and certainly not seasonal. I wondered what the process for this book might have been. Did someone think that Unripe Fruit was an icky title in English for a book about a pre-teen and teenage girl, even though the author chose it herself and the protagonist actively rejects unwanted incursions on her sexuality? It's a translated literary novella rather than a book likely to get the attention of the sort of Twitter mobs that pick over every choice of word by Neil Gaiman. (The title of another story, Sour Cherries would have suited the book rather well too, for its combination of appetitising-and-not, and especially its Polishness, but I guess that would have had similar implications about a young woman if the translator and/or publisher were approaching the title from that same angle. Instead, in English it has been retitled according to the most traumatic story in the book, an event by which I think it's evident that Wiola-the-protagonist would not define herself.
I needlessly put off reading Schultz for maybe 20 years, assuming the content quite different from what it was; whilst not scary, something that wasn't my idea of fun: jagged Buñuel-esque surrealism in which pedestrians were bitten by crocodiles. But it only took me about 18 months from publication to read Wioletta Greg's book, as I had read the beginning of it when it was first released and previously liked her writing in online literary journals.
And 2018 was a better time to read it: I'm not sure I'd have appreciated it as much, or in the same ways, had I read it as part of the 2017 Booker International longlist. I found it a more feminist work than many novels that are explicitly described as such. Gregorszewska takes a style of idyllic reminiscence about growing up strongly associated with male authors, and includes as brief incidents starting periods, and sexual assaults by adult acquaintances, the sort of thing which often get chapters or whole books to themselves dwelling on them with much commentary. (To me the assaults seemed bizarrely many, but the many #metoo accounts of the past year or so indicate that hers probably wasn't an unusual experience. And besides, this was a country in which girls had traditionally married earlier on average than in Western Europe and so may have been viewed as sexual earlier on by more people.) In tone the book is also similar to Cider With Rosie: broadly idyllic, but actually doesn't shy away from the darker aspects of life at the time, including poor housing conditions and human behaviour. Adolescent Wiola goes on with her life in many ways as she had as a child less subject to norms of femininity: the narrative integrates starting her periods in what I felt was a subtly very effective way: it's not a weird thing that seems to make her feel different or even think that she should feel different; she just keeps living and acting much as she pleases, and doing tomboy activities like going about the countryside collecting scrap metal for a school project. Unlike in the reminiscences of older female authors I seem to recall reading when I was younger - but whom I couldn't now specify - it never separates her from tearing about the countryside, or from a sense of her own story and not being beholden to others which historically one saw more often in narratives of growing up by respected male authors. Nor does she even have to discuss this. She just does. Likewise she gets on with other things in life despite being somewhat disturbed by the assaults (the effects are shown by actions rather than introspective writing) and she is entirely absorbed in various projects and other events. I really liked the way Wiola is obsessive about collecting, whether for herself or for school projects, in a way I could strongly relate to, but which popular culture often associates with boys and men.
There are many ways in which to the British reader, the levels of technology make it seem like the story is set decades earlier than the 1980s. (Although it is not surprising if you saw Poland just after the fall of Soviet communism, when horses and carts went about the roads in some areas routinely, whilst in the UK they'd have seemed like apparitions, or wanderers from the set of a costume drama - and dusty slum villages that were like something from a news item filmed in Romania, or outside Europe.) Kids in their early teens still have outdoor and cooking skills worthy of Arthur Ransome or Enid Blyton protagonists. However, glue-sniffing was evidently a problem common to Western and Eastern Europe back then; it was kind of strange seeing what I had thought of as a British social problem of the 1980s pop up in the midst of this half-mythic world - although it is also part of the novel's trajectory, in which modernisation gradually changes the world of Wiola's village , and she becomes less sheltered in her teens.
Unlike in a lot of Polish literature, there's no hint of racial issues being handled with attitudes any different from those in Western Europe, perhaps because Wiola's father likes to talk about his Sinti heritage, and the family was slightly disadvantaged by this under the Communist regime.
As in several of the Central/ East European novels I've read over the past few months, the grandmother is an almost folkloric being and embodiment of ancient ways. Wiola's grandmother wears seven skirts, hosts feathering evenings - where local old women pluck feathers for home-made pillows and quilts - makes traditional dishes such as buckwheat blood pudding and sour rye and potato soup, and puts a red blanket on the bed of an ailing child to draw out the fever. Meanwhile, Communist woman is encouraged to be a worker equal to men, as evinced by Wiola's mother's job making paving slabs at the start of the book.
Her grandfather, an old maker and mender of stoves, is benign and more practical and measured than the narrator's father, an amateur taxidermist and genial, ramshackle eccentric, who is the presiding spirit of the book (just as Bruno Schulz's father is in his first collection).
"He showed me a different kind of geometry of the world, where boundaries are not marked by field margins overgrown with thistles and goosefoot, by cobbled roads, fences or tracks trodden by humans, but instead by light, sound and the elements."
Conflict is usually in the background so that the narrative often retains its picturesque quality despite events:
"my father took over the running of the farm and, to my grandmother’s dismay, began to introduce reforms, gradually turning our homestead into an unruly and exuberant zoo"
and
"since his return from military detention, Dad had been living in two houses: one was a stone ruin wobbling unsteadily over its limestone foundations, while the other, which for years had been forming in his head, was a clean brick house with central heating, an attic scented with resin and a shiny bathroom tiled from floor to ceiling."
However, there is grit too when necessary:
"All that was left of the half-mile of bunting were muddy shreds soaking in the ditch next to empty vodka bottles and cigarette ends."
some of it of the sort you'll recognise if you know less glamorous side of the countryside: "the bones of a rusty harrow protruded from under a tarpaulin among young nettles."
I've rarely encountered a book which contains so much loveliness whilst also not shying away from very unpleasant aspects of life, and I am very impressed by this combination of romanticising-and-not. I was always going to have something of a soft spot for it - if it had been from almost anywhere else I might never have read it due to the English title - but my expectations were surpassed, and I'm glad to see that the sequel, the better-named Accommodations is out in English next year, even if, so far, only a US publication is evident.
(read Oct 2018, review finished Dec 2018. The review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
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