I don’t know what it is about Polish books, but I seem to love them regardless of their genre, style and themes. I’ve just finished two chick lits (which I don’t bother reading in English), an autobiography (I never ever read non fiction if I can help it), and now I’m into a stream of consciousness diary of a writer (another one of my pet hates when it’s, oh, say, by James Joyce).
The chick lits are about intelligent women (I wrote about that at length last year, the difference between an intelligent heroine and an irritating one).
The autobiography is of a writer of humorous murder mysteries. I’ve read all her books and even though she doesn’t know me from a bar of chocolate, I regard her as a friend, so reading her autobiography is kind of like reading her blog.
The stream of consciousness diary? Hmmm. It’s probably because I identify with the writer. She’s a 38-year old whose brilliantly-crafted books don’t sell (are you beginning to see the resemblance?). Her prose is usually poetic: “I’m savouring the wine and the heat. The one is melting into the other. A transfiguration of taste into torture. I close my eyes to prevent them from evaporating. The trees here, even ordinary plantations, are works of art. Their green is mixed with the blue of the sea: Tuscany has united with the sky”... unless it is vulgar: “A woman is a man’s punishment for jerking off.”
She loves shocking the public with very explicit comments about sexuality. She’s scared of the darkness and the enclosed-ness of movie theatres, she’s happy that her beautiful wooden house doesn’t have mice.
She’s a mother of an adored toddler girl and is scared to fall pregnant again “in case it’s a boy”. Every night, she breathes in the scent of her daughter’s hair and knows without a doubt that: “I gave her life and so in exchange I owe to her to sacrifice my own”.
A heady mixture of poetry, life’s truths and shocking offensiveness.
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