The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Miss Nobody by Tomek Tryzna
Amy Havel

Tomek Tryzna. Miss Nobody. Trans. Joanna Trzeciak. Doubleday, 1999. 296 pp. $23.00. (Also published as Girl Nobody by Fourth Estate, 1999, same translator.)

When Marysia, a fifteen-year-old Polish girl, moves from the rural flatlands to an industrial city, she hopes big changes will result, but most specifically she just wants to avoid ending up like her troubled parents. Life with her new friends proves adventurous and offers a whole new set of emotional, sexual, and psychological experiences. Marysia’s vivid imagination supplements these experiences in ways to make sense out of them; over and over, when she is overwhelmed by her own feelings, she finds a way out by creating a new fantastic scenerio. Her eccentric friends, Kasia and Eva, play her as a pawn in their own game of deceit, and so the naivete which was so useful in creating a fantasy reality unfortunately ends up hurting her. All of the action (real or imagined) is interpreted through Marysia’s absolutely adolescent point of view, and Joanna Trzeciak’s excellent translation keeps the originality and specificity of Marysia’s voice intact.
The transitions between Marysia’s two realities are usually seamless and dreamy, only rarely causing moments of confusion. With such artful description and maintenance of voice, it is hard to believe that Miss Nobody is Tryzna’s first novel; he portrays the sometimes brutal environment of adolescence perfectly and with much skill. Also, Tryzna’s statement on Poland’s development away from Communism is subtle but evident; while these characters chronicle a story about the end of individual innocence, they also epitomize the necessity of growing up fast in the unpredictably changing Polish culture. [Amy Havel]