I complimented Beatroot for predicting a rapprochement between PO (Civic Platform) and PiS (Law and “Justice”) the other day. But now the nearly-ruling PiS looks like it’s getting into bed with Lepper’s Samoobrona (see previous post). Political commentators in Poland seem to be in the enviable position that any prediction they make – any at all – will come true soon enough.

Well, there’s no trick in that so I’ll turn to books:

Against my better judgement, I bought Andrzej Stasiuk’s Jadąc do Babadag (“Going to Babadag”). I cannot abide travel writing. Travelling I like and I even like travellers� tales. But books about travel bore me unspeakably. Stasiuk, though, has quite a reputation and I liked his Opowieści Galicyjskie (“Tales of Galicia”, translated into English by Margarita Nafpaktitis).

And indeed, it is clear from the first words of Jadąc do Babadag that this man is a writer, not a travel-writer: “Yes, it is only that fear, those searches, traces, stories, which are to obscure the unattainable line of the horizon. It is night again and everything is receding, disappearing, covered by the black sky.” Besides, this is not western literature. We are firmly in central European territory and inevitably, as the back-cover blurb says, the book is “a journey into the heart of the consciousness of an inhabitant of that part of Europe which has always been regarded as inferior, benighted, primitive and backward.” Indeed. If it is a journey into the heart of Stasiuk’s soul that would explain why he finds the same things everywhere he goes, from Albania to Hungary through Slovakia, Poland and Romania: trash, decay, emptiness, the provinces, rootlessness, bohemia.

Perhaps if he stayed put for more than a few minutes in these Babadags and Sz�k�sveresegyh�zas he would find something that was not already on his mind when he arrived (see interview at www.polishwriting.net). I still have not been brought around to travel writing.