The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Tales of Galicia, by Andrzej Stasiuk, translated by Margarita Nafpaktitis
reviewed by Michael Pinker

Andrzej Stasiuk. Tales of Galicia. Trans. Margarita Nafpaktitis. Twisted Spoon, 2003. 140 pp. Paper: $14.00.

Tales of Galicia begins with what appear to be separate incidents occurring in the southern Polish hinterland that gradually become interwoven as episodes multiply and unspoken or unnoticed connections emerge. They depict the working poor, obscure denizens of small towns and rural residents of nearby collective farms, or what has become of them in their decline, a meltdown apparently as rapid as that of the Soviet Union. These touching, opinionated, rugged characters, reveling in their plague of miseries and occasional epiphany, reveal an unquenchable thirst for life, for more of what life affords, for what they believe is their due. Stasiuk’s terse soundings resonate hauntingly among these nearly destitute, desperately unhappy, joyfully exuberant ne’er-do-wells, whose cries of heartache and drunken cheer echo back and forth as the tales cohere into a novel, their forms of hunger felt as akin to one’s own, like their thwarted ambitions, prostrate beneath ineluctable destiny. We also should enjoy the author’s marvel of impressionistic economy: entire careers and personalities nailed by a single event, a matter of significant choice, a wry twist of fate. While some magical touches in defiance of realism are to be expected, here their sudden mystery works, casting a subtle spell over the events they enchant, setting the stage for the emergence of the novel’s unexpected hero, one returned from the dead, uncomfortably in search of the peace of mind that eluded him in life. The understated nature of Stasiuk’s art, his familiarity with the multitudes of ways in which desperation may dog people’s lives, as well as his unobtrusive display of intimacy with their several flights to doom, prompts one to long for speedy translation of his other works, for by this slim volume alone Stasiuk warrants recognition as a man of letters of a very high order indeed.