Two Cities: On Exile, History, and the Imagination FROM THE PUBLISHER
In October 1945, when Adam Zagajewski was four months old, his family was forced to move from their beloved native city of Lvov to the ugly, industrial, and, until then, German city of Gliwice, Poland. In the evocative title essay of his new collection, Zagajewski describes his efforts to reconcile his contradictory loyalties to his family - and their idealized past - his own place and his time. In "Open Archives," Zagajewski gives the detested officials of postwar Poland their moment to explain. And finally, in the "New Little Larousse," he adds to his treasury of short, philosophical essays, mimicking encyclopedia entries, including pieces entitled "The Untold Cynicism of Poetry," "I Killed Hitler," and "The Inspired Dermatologist." Regardless of their subject, Zagajewski's essays have the subtlety and resonance of poetry: his is one of the most interesting voices in today's Europe.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Polish essayist and poet Zagajewski, residing in Paris since 1982, infuses these haunting autobiographical sketches, lyrical reflections, fables, fantasies and aphoristic brief essays with a sense of traumatic loss and uprootedness. The title piece relates how, in October 1945, when he was four months old, his whole family was expelled from the formerly Polish city of Lvov, which had been incorporated into the U.S.S.R. as a direct result of Yalta Conference deal-making, and deported by cattle car to Gliwice, a Silesian industrial city acquired by Poland from Germany at war's end, where he spent his childhood and adolescence longing for his idealized birthplace. In ``Open Archives,'' through what purports to be a secret-police official's memo, Zagajewski exposes and mocks the brutality and cynicism of communist rule. Along with random thoughts on William Blake, the historical imagination, nihilism and poetry, this collection includes interesting profiles of poet Gottfried Benn, ``a German Mallarm''; obsessive French diarist Paul Lautaud; and Polish Jewish story writer Bruno Schulz, gunned down by a Nazi in 1942. (Mar.)
Library Journal
Zagajewski's title essay meanders through time, moving from 1945, when as an infant he was moved from his family's beloved home city of Lvov to Giwice (Poland), back farther to an idyllic past through his homesick relatives, and then to his present life in Paris. Zagajewski, who has written essays (Solidarity, Solitude, LJ 6/15/90) and poetry (Canvas, LJ 12/91), writes movingly of his divided loyalties-represented by the two cities-to a past he did not inhabit and a future he longs to claim for his own. Unfortunately, the rest of this collection is not so successful. While Zagajewski's observations of politics, literature, and the postwar cynicism that fostered his own creativity show a lively imagination, they simply are not very interesting. His staccato, image-laden sentences, though well crafted, border on hyperbole. Best suited to larger Eastern European collections.-Diane Gardner Premo, SILS, Buffalo Univ., N.Y.
BookList
Known for his philosophic poetry that questions and ponders the human condition in place and in time, Zagajewski, author of two collections of poems, "Tremor" and "Canvas", and a previous collection of essays, "Solidarity, Solitude", has produced another compelling and thought-provoking group of essays. Autobiographical at their core, these pieces were written by an author who steps outside himself to contemplate his past. A cog in the machinery of history, Zagajewski has led a rootless life; he says, "If people are divided into the settled, the emigrants, and the homeless, then I certainly belong to the third category." As the parts of his life story begin to fall into place, an ironic and sad tapestry unrolls itself. Yet he's not all gloom and doom; he's often funny, and his humility is a strong virtue.
Home
