Judging by word of mouth (and not the increasingly obviously phoney bestseller lists bookshops put up by the door to clear out old stock), Leopold Tyrmand’s Z?y (Bad) is the most popular Polish book I know of. Everyone loves this story of a superhero in the grey days of Polish communism. It’s a good few hundred pages but so many people can’t be wrong, so I picked it up and started to read. It started off alright. I was only slightly put off by Tyrmand’s habit of labelling everyone by the kind of clothes they wear. It’s a very Varsovian book and I assumed he was trying to give a flavour of the times: the fashions and the clothes, but also the accents, the moustaches. But as the characters multiplied it all started to get frustrating. This guy wearing the houndstooth jacket – is he the one with the luxuriant moustache or is that the man with the too-short trousers? And is Agnieszka the girl we met at the beginning who was wearing a beret? What happened to the man in the fake leather jacket? Is he going to be in the book again? Oh, here he is – or is that someone else, also wearing a fake leather jacket? Finally, I realised what was wrong. Tyrmand was trying to write the book like you would make a film. Crowd scenes work okay in films. You can introduce fifty people in the first scene and yes, the viewer does single them out by means of visual clues – the checked cap, the green boots, the fact that the camera lingers on one to the near exclusion of the rest. It either doesn’t work that way in books or my imagination is not plastic enough to keep track of ciphers like “black boots” and “red face.” Z?y went the same way as War and Peace, abandoned after the 76th physical description of a possibly insignificant character in chapter one.