Dirty Realism is the term critics use to describe the writings of Marek Nowakowski. He writes about people “on the margins” — drunkards, pimps, criminals, cat torturers, anal rapists and so on — Polish writers seemingly unable to discern the vast mass of people that lie in between the intelligentsia and the dregs. One collection of short stories is entitled Chłopiec z gołębiem na głowie (The Boy with the Pigeon on his Head) and consists almost entirely of beatings, failure, degradation and man’s inhumanity to man. Some of the stories, I should say at once, are very good, like “Sezon” (Season), in which the narrator reveals that he has done a bit of bird himself.

But after a while the catalogue of misery starts to read like — well, a catalogue. It becomes laughably predictable. The 27th story is the unintentionally hilarious “Odmieniec” (roughly, The Misfit). It opens with a typical busy Warsaw street scene, into which wanders the misfit of the title: a young man (probably a bleedin’ stew-dent) with long hair.

After 26 stories mostly about people getting screwed over in dear old Warsaw (what characters used to live there! They’re all gone now, all gone) you can guess more or less what happens in the 27th. Long-hair is saved from a beating (but not from a manhandling and a public humiliation) at the hands of three regular salt-of-the-margins types only by the chance appearance of the fuzz. But here’s where the critics’ label shows its inadequacy: the first line of the story is “This happened in the afternoon in the busiest part of town in front of a modern department store.” So a young man is roughed up in broad daylight in the busiest part of town and nobody lifts a finger to intervene. Dirty the stories may be, but how realistic is this unrelieved misery?

This kind of thing hardly ever happens in my gated complex.