Book description
Andrzej Stasiuk is a restless and indefatigable traveller. His
journeys - by car, train, bus, ferry - take him from his native Poland
to small towns and villages with unfamiliar yet evocative names in
Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova and Ukraine.
Here is an unfamiliar Europe, grappling with the remnants of the
Communist era and the arrival of capitalism and globalisation.
'Where did Moldova end and Transylvania begin,' he wonders, as he is
being driven at breakneck speed in a hundred-year-old Audi - loose
wires hanging from the dashboard - by a driver in shorts and bare
feet, a cross swinging on his chest. And so his journey continues all
the way to Babadag, near the shore of the Black Sea, where he sees his
first minaret.
Born in Warsaw in 1960, Andrzej Stasiuk
has risen to become one of the most important and interesting writers at
work in Eastern Europe today. Author of over a dozen books and winner of
many prizes, he came to writing in an unusual way: in the early 1980s,
he deserted the army and spent a year and a half in prison for it.
Afterwards he wrote a collection of short stories,
The Walls of Hebron
, about his experience, which became a huge success. He and his wife,
Monika Sznajderman, run a small publishing house in Czarne.
