Tab Article
From Publishers Weekly:
Amid the spiritual exhaustion of post-communist Poland, Szczpiorski's everyman Polish hero, Kamil, sums up and relives all his romances in a last-ditch effort to find redemption. A survivor of the tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin, as well as of the more banal totalitarianism that followed, Kamil, as is revealed through the extensive portions of the novel that he narrates, has cuckolded a secret policeman, carried on an affair while in prison during the Solidarity movement and generally loved unwisely and inadequately. Now his final chance arrives in the form of a Mrs. Ruth Gless, a Swiss sociologist interviewing him for a documentary archive commissioned by Radio Geneva. Underneath his bluff irony and smothering sarcasm, Kamil turns out to be a romantic in remission, one who has internalized a guilt about universal human cruelty and about being unequal to the era's challenges. Szczpiorski (The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman) skillfully melds Kamil's conversations and monologues with vivid scenes of confrontation, and with nightmares and guilt-ridden hallucinations, all the while maintaining just the right narrative tempo. Although not quite as compelling as the author's previous works, this novel offers moving reflections on love as seen in history's window.
From Library Journal:
Some authors present life under Communism as an end in itself. A few rare authors use this traumatic experience as a vehicle to explore broader human themes. In this novel, it is romantic love. Kamil is invited to Switzerland to participate in a project that seeks to document the experiences of ordinary people living, first, under Communism and, later, with its collapse. The protagonist tells his story by recounting some of the women he has loved, and although a bit about the state is revealed, mostly the novel explores his innermost feelings toward love and his vulnerability in romantic encounters?emotions not often revealed by men. Szczypiorski shows terrific flashes of wit, melancholy, and insight into the human and political conditions he recalls. His ability to build characters and establish a dialog with himself is outstanding; it is not exaggerating to rank him alongside Ivan Klima and Milan Kundera as a major East European writer. A necessary purchase for all solid fiction collections; libraries that did not purchase his Mass for Arras (LJ 6/1/93) and The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman (LJ 11/15/89) may want to buy them now.
From Booklist:
Kamil, an aging Polish intellectual, is summoned to Geneva, Switzerland, to take part in an oral history project that seeks to record ordinary Eastern Europeans' experiences of historical interest--concentration camps, war, postwar hopes and disillusionment, resistance, and the mixed blessings of liberation--in order to document the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. Met by his guide and interviewer, Kamil immediately embarks on a new relationship with this wealthy, attractive Swiss matron taping his recollections. He soon finds that his life can be explored only in terms of his relationships with women over his lifetime. Kamil ruminates on the complex realities of men and women, indifference and involvement, powerlessness and freedom, love and hate, tenderness and cruelty, life and death, relentless guilt and the eternal hope of redemption. Szczypiorski (whose Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman, 1990, first brought him to the attention of readers of English) turns one individual's history into a powerful portrait of recent--and timeless--human dilemmas.
