Annihilation (Norwegian Literature) - Hardcover

Szewc, Piotr

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1564780341 ISBN 13: 9781564780348

Verlag: Dalkey Archive Press, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

Book by Szewc Piotr

Über diesen Titel

Críticas

Szewc knows that life is made up not of years but of instants. So he collects them and welcomes them between two blinks, between two sighs, between two regrets. He knows, and so do we, that the city in his story . . . no longer exists.

Piotr Szewc's first novel is a considerable literary achievement. . . . A deeply moving novel.

Annihilation . . . is one of the most extraordinary, tremblingly beautiful and chilling novels I have ever read. . . . Szewc's writing resembles the sharp perceptivity of Proust and the bizarre but lifelike gamboling of Chagallian scenes. . . . Annihilation is a sob choked in the throat of all who remember.

Your hometown is about to be annihilated. What would you save? What epitomizes this place that will soon be no more? Szewc's answer to these questions is an elegiac meditation that reconstructs individual moments in the life of his hometown, razed by Nazis years before his birth in 1961. The tastes, smells, and mundane activities of an ordinary day in a small eastern Polish town are preserved here for posterity. A single day is minutely and lovingly resurrected, and all of its lost opportunities and inconsequential details savored. All life here is cherished and suspended, innocent and ignorant of the passage of time. The first English translation of a mesmerizing first novel published in Poland in 1987 is highly recommended for all who revel in poignant imagery.

A daring, beautifully understated experimental novel . . . In meticulously recreating an ordinary day, the omniscient voice of the narrator consecrates the everyday reality of a world he wishes to save from annihilation.

Szewc's aim here is to make a story like a sharply etched grainy photograph of all the minor actions and events that make up ordinary life in an ordinary day. To see, he says, to remember, to record scrupulously, to follow what disappears, not to miss anything. The bright morning, the sweet lazy afternoon, the night that comes on to signify all nights and the darkest nights to come. He captures all of this, amazing to do it in a hundred pages or so. He hasn't missed a thing.

A finely woven web of minute details, as ephemeral as the characters' lives may prove to be in a darkly glimpsed future.

Szewc is to be commended for not having succumbed to the temptation of enhancing his novel by introducing yet another account of Nazi barbarism. His book is written as if in accordance with Elie Wiesel's belief that no fiction can do justice to the atrocities committed in that time. Instead, the serene portrait Szewc paints, complacent as it is, and devoid of the horrors to come, adequately serves his purpose in offering an original approach to that period in history. The strength of Szewc's book lies in this concept.

This remarkable first novel . . . is a powerful statement, an annihilation of our pretty dreams. It is, if you will, a warning that the ravages of history can occur now and here. And isn't this message so disturbing that we will no doubt refuse to heed it

In certain respects Annihilation can be compared to Our Town or Under Milk Wood, but there's this difference: we know the region and its way of life are soon going to be destroyed, many of its inhabitants killed; therefore it seems somehow to be a trip to a land that never existed.

Reseña del editor

Like Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, Annihilation is about a day in the life of a town - in this case, a Polish-Jewish town shortly before World War II. The reader participates in the life of the town instant by instant - from the moment when the local courtesan pours the contents of her chamber pot out her open window up to the moment when the city policemen return to night duty. For the narrator, every object, every person and event belongs to the world he strives to save from impending annihilation: the landscape of beer drops left on a counter, the dance of the Hasidim before the Town Hall, the taste of mint drops in an attorney's mouth. As the minutes on the Town Hall's clock measure the day's passing, and as this day's passing brings the town one day closer to its historical annihilation, a Book of the Day writes itself, preserving the town in memory against the ravages of time and history. Already a success in Poland and in translation in France, Germany, and Italy, Piotr Szewc's novel has been compared to the novels of Proust and to the paintings of Chagall.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: Dalkey Archive Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1564780341
• ISBN 13: 9781564780348
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 112