Polish puzzles: portrait of star writer Dorota Masłowska | EUROtoday

The harm is innocent, but it surely burns. They must be cleaned and moisturized. Plaster on, completed. But you then sit within the workplace at a boring appointment and decide on the items of pores and skin till it bleeds once more. It itches, so that you scratch. Although the wound will then heal extra slowly and will change into contaminated and scarred. But what if she develops secret powers, like in Dorota Masłowska’s new ebook?

The worker of an web café holds out her wrist to a buyer. It is roofed in cuts, she says: “Please don’t be disgusted, this is a magical wound. It never grows, it doesn’t heal. The suffering contained within it is constantly renewed, it awakens and brings never-ending benefits. No matter what you ask of it, it comes true.” One man has even received the Eurojackpot due to the harm. So what to do? Putting a want into the material? Or lastly purchase a printer and by no means set foot in an Internet café once more? Because again there, between computer systems and champagne bottles, lies a dull lottery winner.

It is just not straightforward to seek out your method round Dorota Masłowska’s grotesque world. It was really alleged to be a novel with out supernatural components, however: “The present doesn’t fit into realism,” she mentioned lately on the Berlin premiere on the Polish Institute. After all, 176 pages are sufficient to ship the characters on wanderings by means of nameless medium-sized cities, postcard idylls and by way of sewers into the afterlife. For instance, there’s the good-for-nothing bartender who hooks up along with his cousin. Fortunately, a number of levels of relationship separate them. Or the proprietor of the stylish bakery, with an aura that appears prefer it’s manufactured from sea foam. Although she bakes the very best bread within the metropolis, she appears to repeatedly flip to sourdough.

The wild content material is mirrored within the kind. Just as a result of it says “novel” on the quilt doesn’t essentially imply there’s a novel inside. The 9 chapters are loosely linked to one another; most important characters from one story repeatedly seem as secondary characters within the subsequent. Masłowska sees the textual content as a hybrid that also needs to operate as a set of tales, she explains in an interview. A brand new enterprise in a profession that has now spanned 200 years.

At least that is what the presenter mentioned on the premiere studying. A humorous however not so far-fetched mistake, as Masłowska, now 42, has been publishing for many years. It’s usually about shirtless regular folks, losers, males in disaster. Even earlier than she graduated from highschool, she wrote “Snow White and Russian Red,” a novel that captures what defines her writing to today: how personal trivia and main upheavals belong collectively. In the debut, a younger hero wallows in heartbreak as Warsaw prepares for an additional struggle towards Moscow. Masłowska grew to become a star. This was adopted by additional novels, volumes of columns, performs, prizes, even two hip-hop albums that had been largely freed from international disgrace. Her novel “Other People” is formulated as a rap textual content. Her model is filled with neologisms, anglicisms, slang. He goes straight to the twelve, subverting expectations.

Take her earlier novel, “Bowie in Warsaw.” A deception, because the pop star solely seems briefly twice. In between, the writer attracts an ethical image of the socialist Nineteen Seventies, together with serial killers, noir components and lesbian want. This challenges the viewers and the translator. Her German translator Olaf Kühl reads his variations out loud in a single go, says Masłowska. Because the sound must be proper. This time it was troublesome, he instructed the writer on the cellphone. At some level it match, this driving, shrill textual content filled with phrases like “residual body”, “private boa” and “cheesebread reviewer”. The quantity is named “In Paradise,” as is the one story that doesn’t happen in Poland.

In it, the author Zoldana travels overseas for a writing scholarship. Their homeland is just not talked about, however they most likely moved to Switzerland from southeastern Europe, maybe Croatia or Bosnia. She swaps her poor mother and father’ home, which is filled with sweets, for the Goretex luxurious of the Alpine republic. An virtually excellent place that has little in frequent with post-communist international locations. Masłowska is aware of this from her personal expertise. She wrote this new ebook whereas spending six months close to Zurich on a writing scholarship. It was a “psychological horror”. On the one hand, it’s each writer’s dream to have the ability to commit themselves solely to writing in such a setting. At the identical time, you might be alone along with your interior life, thrown again on your self with out distraction. “It’s luxurious, but heavy,” she says, laughing a little bit herself.

An ambivalence that additionally runs by means of the studying. The title “In Paradise” might initially sound like cynicism, however a brand new that means quickly emerges. Zoldana’s alienation and loneliness are so severe exactly as a result of she believes she is within the place of her goals. If she will be able to’t be glad right here, the place can she be? This is the tragedy inherent in all tales: paradise is just not a spot, however an angle. And the posture of a lot of the characters is unhealthy.

Their situations are favorable. A pair throws a housewarming social gathering for his or her new residence, a medium-sized metropolis treats itself to a shopping mall with multi-parking, a love-struck lady escapes from “the lifeless succession of table and toilet”. And what ought to folks complain about? Anyone who has traveled to Poland in recent times has been amazed. Within just some a long time, the nation has developed into an up-and-coming laboratory for the longer term.

While Germany’s financial system is groaning, Poland’s is rising by round three % per yr. Everything seems new, cash-free and frictionless. Paradise situations. As a columnist, Masłowska wandered by means of Warsaw and famous that “despite the poverty that still exists, for the first time in my life I see how skyscrapers shoot into the sky, how well dressed the people are, how money sometimes gushes on the streets.”

And but the brand new ebook is pervaded by an uneasiness. Because cash and progress alone can’t change what has lengthy formed Poland’s collective reminiscence: shortages, struggle, oppression. While 88 % of all Poles described themselves as believing Catholics within the 2011 census, the determine was solely round 71 % within the final survey in 2021. The outcome? “A lack of identity,” says the writer. She is an atheist. Nevertheless, her ebook is filled with Marian figures and non secular references. It isn’t any coincidence that the magical wound additionally reminds us of the Christian stigmata. According to Masłowska, even in case you are not a believer, you can’t escape the cultural affect of Christianity – and due to this fact use it as inspiration for surreal scenes. Regardless of whether or not a personality is caught in an in-between world or on a disappointing sushi date: the change in values ​​impacts everybody.

They fulfill their starvation for that means and help with meals. In this ebook there’s fixed snacking, consuming and serving. Food is a standing image and a projection floor. The hostess drives all around the metropolis to get the nice fondue cheese, solely to finish up ordering it on-line. Raven moms feed white flour to their kids. The truth {that a} couple’s affair is doomed turns into obvious on the lodge buffet: “‘Now that we’re together, I don’t have to work anymore,’ I explained sexily, smearing margarine on the old, worn-out, soggy toast.”

This is harking back to the tiring meals debates on this nation: Union politicians complain about veggie sausages and miss down-to-earth bread overseas. Cafés now assemble a menu of metropolitan stereotypes: Prenzlauer Berg moms have been consuming latte macchiatos for 20 years, app inventors sip flat white and shrink back from actual work, whereas anorexic Pilates women cling to their matcha lattes. A distinction is recommended utilizing just some meals: between hard-working, unpretentious makers and aloof cosmopolitans who enable themselves to be robbed by the hipster bakery across the nook. And Masłowska is concentrating on the latter: “This group thinks they are great, sensible, differentiated, they are the ideal consumers. Even though I probably belong to it myself, I just have to mock this group.”

Does she must? She hardly ever breaks by means of clichés. The miso yuppies are continuously consuming, however you be taught little new about them, nor in regards to the poorer or the richer ones. Of course a flophouse serves horrible breakfast. Of course the massive metropolis roommates snort on the nation bumpkin who would not know what Tom Kha is. As authentic as Masłowska’s language video games, her tempo and her humor are, her gastro-sociology tastes relatively bland.

The textual content is most convincing when it doesn’t flip its characters into discursive placeholders, however relatively when it will get to know them personally. When he zooms method too shut on her self-sabotage, her scratches and bumped elbows. Because with just a few exceptions, nothing that occurs to the characters is basically outrageous. They simply do not see it and fall into the subsequent entice. This is very uncomfortable to learn when you see your self within the characters. It’s not the tip of the world. The writer factors to the struggle towards Ukraine and elsewhere, to “the psychopaths in power” and says: “In this context, our identity conflicts and what capitalism is doing to us are not too dramatic.”

“In Paradise” is a cumbersome ebook. It would not present any solutions and would not present any consolation. It outlines the void between cash and religion, want and disappointment and suggests: There isn’t any paradise right here. But when you cease choosing at your wounds, one may come up.