The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction

Eastern Europe I

After the collapse of Communism, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland made the transition to free-market democracies more smoothly than did most of the other former Soviet-bloc nations. Here, too, the domestic literary marketplace was completely overturned as well. For four decades, the state’s control of publishing, from editorial decisions to the size of print runs, had been pervasive, albeit also affording writers who worked within the system considerable security. Books were inexpensive, and a literary culture was actively (if very circumspectly) fostered. Then with the collapse of the Communist regimes, many restrictions (and much support) fell away. Publishers flooded the market with previously unavailable work, and foreign popular fiction easily crowded out domestic efforts, leading to what was widely seen as both a dumbing-down and a selling-out of literature.

During this sudden transition, many writers, especially those with audiences in the West, also lost their subject matter. Overnight, dissident fiction was passé. Writers from the German Democratic Republic had it the easiest, as they were readily integrated into a large, existing market and generally adapted to the new conditions quickly. In the linguistically isolated Eastern European countries, though, authors had a more difficult time. Even in the best of times, relatively little fiction was translated into English from east European languages, and without the frisson of the forbidden, the interest of English-language publishers and readers in contemporary eastern European fiction plummeted. But with some carryover from Communist times, and a few distinctive new voices attracting attention, the situation in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland is not as dismal as in other formerly Soviet-dominated areas (Ukraine, southeast Europe, and the Central Asian states). Even so, English-speaking readers still have access to only a very small selection of fiction from the region.

CRIME FICTION IN EASTERN EUROPE

It was nearly impossible to write or publish realistic contemporary crime fiction under the totalitarian regimes, since such books might suggest failures or shortcomings of the system. Consequently, the crimes presented in the fiction of the Soviet-dominated era usually were those considered to be against the state, rather than against individuals, the guilty party inevitably (indeed, by definition) the class enemy—or a foreign agent. Nevertheless, mystery novels in the classic English tradition (and often with an English setting), such as Hungarian Jenő Rejtő’s (1905–1943)—writing as P. Howard—were immensely popular during Communist times.

Czech author Josef Škvorecký’s (1924–2012) Lieutenant Boruvka is the most interesting detective figure to come out of Communist Eastern Europe, with Škvorecký creating the character while still in Czechoslovakia and continuing to use him in his fiction after he moved abroad in 1969. Boruvka eventually also resettled, as did his creator, in Canada. Though not his best work, the Boruvka stories and novels are among the few describing actual criminal police work in a Communist country.

Even after the Communist era, little crime fiction from the region has been translated. Polish author Marek Krajewski’s (b. 1966) novels, beginning with Death in Breslau (1999, English 2008), were among the first to gain a wider audience, but they do not deal with contemporary conditions and instead take place, as does Czech author Pavel Kohout’s (b. 1928) The Widow Killer (1995, English 1998), around the time of the Third Reich.

Even though Jaroslav Hašek’s (1883–1923) The Good Soldier Schweik (1921–1923, English 1930, 1973) and several works of fiction by Karel Čapek (1890–1938), who is best known for coining the word “robot” in his play R.U.R. (1920, English 1923, 1990), remain in print and circulation in English, the two best-known Czech writers of the twentieth century turned to other languages for some or all of their work. The iconic Franz Kafka (1883–1924) wrote in German, and Milan Kundera (b. 1929), the most acclaimed Czech postwar novelist, eventually turned to writing in French after moving to France in 1975 and being stripped of his Czechoslovak citizenship. Both are known for the precision of their expression, and Kundera also takes great pains to ensure the final editions and translations of his work are definitive; his first novel, The Joke (1967), went through five English translations between 1969 and 1992.

Most of Kundera’s books have been novels of ideas, and his penchant for essayistic asides has grown more pronounced over the decades. With its four different narrators and mix of humor and politics (a character’s future is ruined by a politically incorrect joke he writes on a postcard), the polyphonic The Joke is already a typical Kundera novel. Several more also deal with Czech conditions, combining his literary and philosophical musings with stories grounded in the political minefield of living in Czechoslovakia in those years, especially in regard to the brief and quickly extinguished hope of the Prague Spring in 1968. The loosely connected narratives of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978, English 1980, 1996), in which the author appears as himself repeatedly stepping forward to comment and digress, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984, English 1984), set in 1968 Prague, are the most successful of these works.

Immortality (1990, English 1991), though written in Czech, is set in France and is Kundera’s most metafictional work, with Kundera himself present as the narrator and going so far as to offer conversations between Goethe and Hemingway in the afterlife. The whole novel unfolds around a simple gesture, which Kundera uses as a starting point for his digressions on everything from the form of the novel to death. Beginning with Slowness (1995, English 1996), Kundera’s novels have been written in French, and although somewhat more focused on story than is the digressive Immortality, these works continue in the same vein to varying degrees, making up a slightly lesser part of his impressive œuvre.

Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997) is venerated by Central European writers (and readers), including Kundera, although he is unaccountably far less known in English translation. A Close Watch on the Trains (now published as Closely Watched Trains; 1965, English 1968), set at the end of World War II, with its varied cast of mainly small-town characters, provides a healthy dose of sex and, with its both humorous and melancholy feel, is a good example of his work. Despite being a prolific story writer, Hrabal’s finest works are two novels. I Served the King of England (1971, English 1989) is a rise-and-fall story, the narrator beginning as a lowly busboy who, after World War II, briefly runs his own hotel and makes millions, only to lose it all after the Communist takeover. The aging narrator of Too Loud a Solitude (1977, English 1991) has long worked in a wastepaper-recycling plant. Over the years he has steadily taken forbidden books consigned to be destroyed and has educated himself by reading them. As he tells his story, his spirit has been crushed by modern ways and indifference, as also symbolized by the new and impersonal recycling plant, which has made obsolete the one at which he has worked his entire life.

Although Pavel Kohout (b. 1928) is best known as a dramatist, some of his black satires of life under Communism had wonderful premises and deserve better than the obscurity into which their English versions have fallen. In White Book (1970, English 1977), the protagonist learns through sheer willpower how to defy the laws of gravity and thus is able to walk on ceilings, an ability the state cannot condone and forcefully opposes. In the very dark novel The Hangwoman (1978, English 1981), a girl’s only opportunity for an education is at a school that would train her to become the world’s first female executioner. I Am Snowing (1993, English 1994) is one of the first translated novels examining the transition from Communism, dealing mainly with the question of collaboration under the old regime but also touching on the Nazi period. It is a surprisingly bleak novel, as the yoke of the Communist era still hangs heavily on its characters, and instead of seizing the opportunities the new circumstances should offer, the protagonist Petra sees only uncertainty.

The Holocaust has been central to almost all of Arnošt Lustig’s (1926–2011) fiction, most of which is set around the time of World War II. Along with Aharon Appelfeld and Imre Kertész, Lustig’s straightforward depictions of harsh realities make him the leading exponent of the literature examining those events and their human toll.

Much of Ivan Klíma’s (b. 1931) work uses autobiographical elements. His most appealing works are the collection of stories of artists and intellectuals that opposed the Communist system and the jobs that they took just in order to survive, which includes My Golden Trades (1990, English 1992) and the novel Love and Garbage (1987, English 1990), in which the narrator becomes a street sweeper. Judge on Trial (1979, English 1991) is a much broader examination of the moral and ethical issues that arise under totalitarian regimes. The personal and moral compromises that the protagonist, Adam Kindl, must make are the same as those many Czechoslovak citizens faced, but his position in the justice system makes these compromises even more consequential. An obvious attempt to write a summary of an era and a nation, with echoes of and homages to other Czech literary greats, Judge on Trial is, in parts, too forced and drawn out but is still a fine novel.

Klíma has continued to write and publish after the collapse of Communism. With its protagonist a (religious) minister, The Ultimate Intimacy (1996, English 1997) only peripherally touches on the political changes after 1990, whereas No Saints or Angels (1999, English 2001), narrated by a woman whose husband has left her and who is struggling to raise her teenage daughter, is a more complete work of contemporary Czech life.

• Josef Škvorecký’s (1924–2012) The Engineer of Human Souls (1977, English 1984), contrasting life in Communist Czechoslovakia with that in exile in Canada, is a central text in his output. From his Dvorak in Love (1984, English 1986), describing the Czech composer’s visits to the United States in the late nineteenth century, and The Bride of Texas (1992, English 1996), about the American Civil War, to murder mysteries, he has produced several variations on his Czechoslovak themes.

• Ludvík Vaculík’s (1926–2015) novels include The Axe (1966, English 1973), with its portrayal of disillusionment with Communism in Czechoslovakia, and the more surreal The Guinea Pigs (1973, English 1973).

• Vladimír Páral’s (b. 1932) comic and entertaining depictions of everyday life, Catapult (1967, English 1993), The Four Sonyas (1971, English 1993), and Lovers and Murderers (1969, English 2002), are not always obviously political.

• Jiří Gruša’s (1938–2011) life story in The Questionnaire (1978, English 1982) is a clever exposition.

On January 1, 1993, Czechoslovakia was split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, a division that has not been treated extensively in the post-Communist literature in translation. As is also true regarding much of the fiction from elsewhere in eastern Europe, the familiar authors still dominate what little is available in English from either state, with few new authors breaking through as of yet.

Among the few who have is Jáchym Topol (b. 1962), whose voice is definitely that of a new generation. Topol’s exuberant City Sister Silver (1994, English 2000) is set during the tumultuous Czech transition from a Communist state to a free-market democracy. Lauded for its use of language in the original, which is full of colloquialisms, slang, neologisms, and idiosyncratic spelling, the translation at least conveys a sense of much of what the author was trying to do in his freewheeling novel. The narrator, Potok, leads the reader in an impressionistic, multilayered narrative through Czechoslovakia’s unrestrained first years after Communism. The plot can be difficult to follow, but Potok’s adventures take him far and wide through those anything-goes years and suggest just how tumultuous they were.

• Patrik Ouředník (b. 1957), a resident of France since the mid-1980s, is interested in abstract literary and linguistic experimentation, as demonstrated in his Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century (2001, English 2005), as well as in Case Closed (2006, English 2010), which is ostensibly a mystery but in which the crimes and police investigation also allow Ouředník to offer an amusing critical look at the Czech character over recent decades.

More popular, and more approachable is the fiction of Michal Viewegh (b. 1962), though astonishingly only his Bringing Up Girls in Bohemia (1994, English 1997) has been translated to date. It is one of the more enjoyable novels situated in rapidly changing eastern Europe, and the novel’s heroine, the flighty Beata, is an ideal character to skim across all aspects of the new society, despite meeting an unhappy end.

Foreign readers may still hardly differentiate between Czech and Slovak literature, especially considering how little explicitly Slovak fiction is available. Martin M. Šimečka’s (b. 1957) powerful The Year of the Frog (1990, English 1993) is a work about the Communist Czechoslovakian state and its abuses. Its protagonist is a young man prevented from going to university because his dissident father is in prison, so he takes a series of jobs that do not require any qualifications. However worthy, Šimečka’s novel seemed almost immediately to be eclipsed by events. Peter Pišt’anek’s (1960–2015) trilogy begins with Rivers of Babylon (1991, English 2007), which tackles the rapidly changing Slovakian scene. In this satire, the country bumpkin Rácz avails himself of all the opportunities that the changing political systems present as he moves up quickly in this new world, in one of the grander comic epics of recent times. The second volume of the trilogy, The Wooden Village (1994, English 2008), is similarly inventive, and the last volume, The End of Freddy (1999, English 2008), is a more adventurous mix of airport thriller, adventure story, and satire.

Communist rule not only affected active writers but also determined the fate of previously published work. The work of many of the leading local writers from the first half of the twentieth century had been prohibited or ignored, so after the fall of Communism, interest in these writers has been renewed, especially in Hungary and Romania. In the Hungarian case, this interest has extended abroad, with new editions and translations of many of these authors. The tragic story of Sándor Márai (1900–1989), who spent some forty years in obscurity in American exile before committing suicide, just before achieving an international breakthrough, is the best known. Miklós Bánffy’s (1874–1950) epic Transylvanian trilogy (1934–1940, English 1999–2001), the creative fiction of Gyula Krúdy (1878–1933) and Dezső Kosztolányi (1885–1936), and the deceptively light and playful novels of Antal Szerb (1901–1945) also have now reached larger audiences abroad.

Despite this renaissance of early-twentieth-century Hungarian literature, the path to the English-speaking market has rarely been smooth for Hungarian fiction. Even after becoming a surprise modern-day best seller in several European countries, Márai’s Embers (1942, English 2001) shockingly was published in a second-hand translation, from the German translation rather than the original Hungarian. And only after he had been awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize did Imre Kertész (b. 1929) begin to receive greater attention in the English-speaking world.

Some of the books by the popular author Magda Szabó (1917–2007) appeared in English in the 1960s, most notably the novel Night of the Pig-Killing (1960, English 1965), but she really established herself among English-speaking readers only with the second translation of The Door (1987, English 1994, 2005). This story of the relationship between a writer and her aging and very independent housekeeper is a profound and, from its opening sentences, striking work. Its unusual success the second time around, barely a decade after it was first translated (when it inexplicably attracted little attention), demonstrates the roles of luck, timing, circumstances, and the commitment and capacity of publishers in the fate of a book.

Two of Imre Kertész’s (b. 1929) novels were available in English before he received the Nobel Prize; these, too, were then released in new translations: Fateless (1975, English 1992, and as Fatelessness, 2004) and Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990, English 1997, and as Kaddish for an Unborn Child, 2004). Much of Kertész’s œuvre is interconnected, consisting of autobiographical books about the Holocaust and about writing about the Holocaust. Although there are earlier works, Fatelessness is the obvious starting point for his fiction. His experiences in Budapest and then the Nazi concentration camps during World War II, as well as the difficulty of returning home after the war, are the basis for almost all his later novels. In Kaddish for an Unborn Child, as also in Liquidation (2003, English 2004) and Fiasco (1988, English 2011), Kertész describes the difficulties of dealing with those experiences, and especially of writing about them. While best understood and appreciated in the context of his entire output, each of these variations on his themes is compelling.

Much of George (György) Konrád’s (b. 1933) fiction is autobiographical as well, including his first novel, the harrowing The Case Worker (1969, English 1974), based on his own experiences as a social worker. It is unusual in that its unvarnished look at bureaucracy and its failures does not specifically target or blame ideology. In Konrád’s The City Builder (1975, English 1977), which uses urban planning as a metaphor for the planned society, the protagonist is worn down over the years, from being an architect with grand plans to becoming a cog in the totalitarian machine. In The Loser (1982), published in English long before it could appear in Hungarian, the protagonist, who is a patient in a mental institution, tries to escape his personal failures and ambitions and the insanity of the outside world.

Celestial Harmonies (2000, English 2004), Péter Esterházy’s (b. 1950) splintered novel about his father and his family, spans much of Hungarian history and is one of the most important texts to appear in Hungary in recent times. It is not in any way a straightforward narrative, however, and is as much concerned with language and memory as it is with history but rewards the effort needed to understand it. Unfortunately, it is only half the story, for after writing it, Esterházy discovered that his father had, in fact, been a longtime informer to the secret police, which led him to write a “revised edition,” a sequel incorporating the newly revealed information. Published in 2002 as Javított kiadás, this necessary supplement to Celestial Harmonies has not yet been translated into English.

Esterházy’s most experimental fiction, such as the nearly two-hundred-page Függő (1981), written as a single sentence, has not been translated, but several somewhat more accessible works have been. In Helping Verbs of the Heart (1985, English 1991), Esterházy deals with his mother’s death. A Little Hungarian Pornography (1984, English 1995), appropriately laden with sex, is another collection of fragments that serves as a good introduction to the author. His homage, The Book of Hrabal (1990, English 1994), is a dense work with multiple perspectives but does offer Western readers more reference points, from Bohumil Hrabal to Charlie Parker.

Péter Nádas’s (b. 1942) childhood novel, The End of a Family Story (1977, English 1998), recalls 1950s Hungary and family history, but his A Book of Memories (1986, English 1997) is his greatest achievement. With its book-within-a-book, multiple perspectives, and evocations of sensuality and yearning, this partially autobiographical meditation on memory and creativity is written in the tradition of books by Marcel Proust and Robert Musil. At well over a thousand pages, the loosely structured Parallel Stories (2005, English 2011) is an even more massive novel of twentieth-century Central European life and history. Dominated by two families, one Hungarian and one German, and accounts of two specific eras—the early 1960s, and the time around the fall of the Berlin Wall—Nádas’s work weaves in many parallel (and perpendicular) stories, though much is left frustratingly open-ended.

László Krasznahorkai (b. 1954) has slowly crept into the consciousness of readers in the English-speaking world via the cult favorite Béla Tarr’s film versions of his work, including Satantango (1985, English 2012) and The Melancholy of Resistance (1989, English 1998). Krasznahorkai’s puzzling narratives are not easily disentangled, with their long sentences, dense and detailed precision, and single-paragraph chapters demanding concentration, but the sense of unease he creates in his depictions of societal instability are remarkable. The Melancholy of Resistance, all sinister gloom, is set in a small Hungarian town, on which a traveling circus, complete with the world’s largest stuffed whale, has descended. In War and War (1999, English 2006), an archivist transports an ancient manuscript to New York and plans to upload it on the Internet in order to preserve it before committing suicide. The story in the manuscript, another journey tale, unfolds side by side with the protagonist’s. The chapters of Krasznahorkai’s novel Seiobo There Below (2008, English 2013) are connected by their themes of beauty and art rather than plot or story. It is the first of Krasznahorkai’s works appearing in English that also fully exhibits his fascination with Japan and Japanese culture.

Romania has sizable German- and Hungarian-speaking minorities, each of which has an impressive literary tradition. Both the rising stars Attila Bartis (b. 1968) and György Dragomán (b. 1973) were born in Romania before eventually moving to Hungary. Bartis’s dark but dynamic Tranquillity (2001, English 2008) is an account of a nightmarish mother–son relationship during the slow collapse of the Communist system in Hungary. In György Dragomán’s (b. 1973) widely acclaimed The White King (2005, English 2007), an eleven-year-old boy talks about growing up in a totalitarian regime resembling that of Ceauşescu’s Romania.

• György Dalos’s (b. 1943) translated novels range from futuristic satire to fictionalized autobiography. As a sequel to George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) and with its setting in England, the timely 1985 (1982, English 1983), in which Dalos kills off Big Brother, may be easier than most East European satires for Western readers to relate to. The Guest from the Future (1996, English 1998) is a creative historical fiction about the relationship between Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin.

Several Czech poets found international acclaim after World War II, notably the 1984 Nobel laureate Jaroslav Seifert (1901–1986) and the brilliant Miroslav Holub (1923–1998), but it is Poland, with its two Nobel laureates—Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) in 1980 and Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) in 1996—as well as Tadeusz Różewicz (1921–2014) and Zbigniew Herbert (1924–1998) that might well look to outsiders as a nation where all the leading authors have devoted themselves to poetry, at least in recent decades.

The works of the great Polish novelists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including those by Nobel winners Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916) and Władysław Reymont (1867–1925), now are largely out of fashion in the West. Although Sienkiewicz’s best-known work, Quo Vadis (1895, English 1896), lingers, his other historical novels and works such as Reymont’s four-season epic The Peasants (1902–1909, English 1924–1925) and Bolesław Prus’s (1847–1912) grand The Doll (1890, English 1972, revised 1996) barely register any longer. In contrast, the groundbreaking and still strikingly modern novels of the interwar period, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s (1885–1939) dark, utopian Insatiability (1930, English 1977, revised 1996) and Witold Gombrowicz’s (1904–1969) playfully existential Ferdydurke (1937, English 1961, 2000), as well as the fiction of Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) stand almost in isolation in Polish literature. World War II and then the Communist takeover made it difficult for Polish writers to build on these works.

Even the major novelist of the postwar period, Stanisław Lem (1921–2006), is set apart from the rest of contemporary Polish literature, unfairly marginalized as a science fiction author. While some of his work can be considered straightforward science fiction, Lem goes far beyond plot- and gadget-driven fiction with his philosophical and futuristic speculation, and among his most successful works are a variety of metafictions, beginning with A Perfect Vacuum (1971, English 1979), which consists of book reviews of imaginary books. Even at its most comic, his fiction builds philosophically intriguing thought-experiments on its creative premises. Solaris (1961, English 1970), a novel that is truly other-worldly—and was filmed twice, by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972) and Steven Soderbergh (2002)—in which space travelers encounter a planet-spanning entity that is an intelligent life-form but remains beyond their comprehension, as well as various and often comical works featuring space traveler Ijon Tichy, are consistently entertaining.

The arc of Tadeusz Konwicki’s (1926–2015) work covers the years from the end of World War II through the fall of Communism in Poland. In the existential A Dreambook for Our Time (1963, English 1969), the main character is still haunted by the war even years later. The devastatingly critical The Polish Complex (1979, English 1982) and A Minor Apocalypse (1979, English 1983) manage also to be deeply personal documents about individual fates within the oppressive system. Like Russian author Vladimir Sorokin’s (b. 1955) Soviet classic The Queue (1985, English 1988), The Polish Complex is told entirely by people waiting in a long line: it is the day before Christmas, and the narrator, named Tadeusz Konwicki, stands in line in front of a jewelry store. In its digressions, The Polish Complex reveals the conditions and circumstances of various people in that time.

Most of Andrzej Szczypiorski’s (1924–2000) far more traditional works are concerned with aspects of the German and Jewish questions, especially in his novel of occupied Warsaw, The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman (1986, English 1990). Self-Portrait with Woman (1994, English 1995), a novel framed as an attempt to consider the post-Communist transition, is a broader but also more personal document. In the novel, the central character, Kamil, lets the loves of his life pass in review as the most appropriate means of summing up what he has lived through. More attuned to the international literary marketplace, Szczypiorski’s is easily among the most approachable recent Polish fiction but is far more conventional, too.

Paweł Huelle’s (b. 1957) Who Was David Weiser? (1987, English 1991), a retrospective look at the disappearance of a Jewish boy in 1957 Gdansk, with elements of magical realism, was an auspicious if uneven debut. Huelle’s later novels have become increasingly looser and digressive, with a good deal of what amounts to milling around, though built on appealing premises. Castorp (2004, English 2007) imagines the Gdansk (Danzig) university years of Hans Castorp from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, in an entertaining literary usurpation that is his most broadly appealing novel to date. Mercedes Benz (2001, English 2004) is yet another tribute—though very different from Péter Esterházy’s The Book of Hrabal—to Bohumil Hrabal, a family history focusing on the cars they have owned that makes for a particularly creative examination of the past few decades of Polish history. The Last Supper (2007, English 2008) follows a number of characters who have been asked to pose for a picture for a contemporary version of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper in a more scattershot depiction of modern Polish society.

Slightly unusual slices of common lives are found in Jerzy Pilch’s (b. 1952) genial entertainments His Current Woman (1995, English 2002), with its hapless narrator, and the alcoholic tale The Mighty Angel (2001, English 2009), with its even sorrier characters. Olga Tokarczuk’s (b. 1962) small-town portraits House of Day, House of Night (1998, English 2003) and the more ambitious Primeval and Other Times (1996, English 2010)—set in a place called Primeval—are about daily life during the twentieth century that also has mythical, timeless qualities.

A third leading author of that generation and these times is Andrzej Stasiuk (b. 1960), whose novels convey a post-Communist desperation as the economic transformation of Poland wreaks havoc on so many lives, whether in a small town, as in Tales of Galicia (1995, English 2003), or in Warsaw, as in Nine (1999, English 2007). White Raven (1995, English 2001), in which the characters attempt to at least briefly escape the changes that have overwhelmed them, is a good if slightly underdeveloped introduction to the author’s works.

Magdalena Tulli’s (b. 1955) works of fiction, such as Dreams and Stones (1995, English 2004), Flaw (2006, English 2007), and Moving Parts (2003, English 2005), with its narrator chasing down his characters and story, are completely different, poetic meditations that go beyond the Kafkaesque in their sparse plots. Tulli’s unusual perspectives give all her writing and descriptions a surreal quality, and even Flaw, the story of a city square and the nearby inhabitants’ lives, with the local order increasingly upset by refugees coming and camping out there, is not straightforward.

OTHER POLISH WRITERS

The works of other leading Polish authors are more difficult to classify.

Despite its embellishments, Ryszard Kapuściński’s (1932–2004) travel writing is among the most creative nonfiction of recent years and has made him one of the most popular Polish authors abroad. His vastly entertaining portrait of the end of Ethiopian Haile Selassie’s reign, The Emperor (1978, English 1983), and The Soccer War (1979, English 1990) will always be widely read.

Stanisław Lec (1909–1966) is an author who remains to be rediscovered, with only a few collections of his classical aphorisms, Unkempt Thoughts (English 1962) and More Unkempt Thoughts (English 1968), having made it into English thus far.

• Wiesław Myśliwski’s (b. 1932) Stone Upon Stone (1999, English 2011) and A Treatise on Shelling Beans (2006, English 2013) are entertaining tours leading readers through twentieth-century Poland and the many changes it has undergone.

• Jerzy Andrzejewski’s (1909–1983) Ashes and Diamonds (1948, English 1962) is the most immediate novel of the postwar transition to Communism in Poland, and even though some aspects of it may now appear naive, it captures well the spirit of the time. Later works by Andrzejewski make an interesting progression of disillusionment with a system he once fervently admired.

• Kazimierz Brandys (1916–2000) went into exile in 1981, and his nonfiction is of particular documentary interest, but he also wrote several fine novels, including Rondo (1982, English 1989), dealing with the German occupation, and A Question of Reality (1977, English 1980).

• Untamed Marek Hłasko (1934–1969) was the best-known writer of the counterculture to establish himself in Poland. His fiction, including the novels The Eighth Day of the Week (1957, English 1958), about a young couple looking for a private place to be intimate, and Killing the Second Dog (1965, English 1990), about two Poles in 1960s Israel, is unlike almost anything else written in Polish at that time.

• Stefan Chwin’s (b. 1949) Death in Danzig (1995, English 2004), Piotr Szewc’s (b. 1961) Annihilation (1987, English 1999), and Marek Bieńczyk’s (b. 1956) Tworki (1999, English 2008) all are powerful novels set during World War II and are the only titles available in English by these authors.