It’s a good thing I’m not a proper book reviewer, editor, or proof reader or anything. I would be unbearable. Reading Reisefieber by Miko?aj ?ozi?ski, for instance, I keep running into annoying lapses. Who the hell cares if the narrator (when working as a journalist) takes his lunch break at two in the afternoon? I do: he starts work at eight. I can’t take seriously the soul searching of someone who only stops to eat after six hours, i.e. (since this is France of the 7 hour working day) about one hour before knocking off time. And that the narrator makes a living now by doing “small” translations from French and Swedish? Is it possible to support oneself in Paris by doing “small” translations? It isn’t in Dublin, or not unless you do an awful lot of them. And then there’s Astrid, who before going out washes her hands and only notices they are still wet when she is in the lift. Does her flat have no door handles? The lift no buttons? The narrator, like the author, is a writer (indeed, he resembles ?ozi?ski in many — purely superficial, of course — ways) whose friends often ask him how the book is going (aren’t non-writers so annoying?) Some ask him what it will be about, to which he replies that it will be a “modern novel.” Fortunately, he thinks, no one has had the interest or the courage to ask him what this means. Real friends — the kind you might find outside the pages of a novel — would put up a better show of interest. If you wanted your plebian non-writer mates to stop bugging you with questions about the book you wouldn’t pique their curiosity by calling it a “modern novel.” And besides, the question asked is “what’s the book about” (“o czym to b?dzie”) not “what kind of a book is it.”

By way of contrast, here’s Tadeusz R�?ewicz (59 years ?ozi?ski’s senior) in the stage directions to his Akt przerwany: “On the shelf lie a few grey hairs, which cannot be seen from the auditorium.”

That’s more like it.

(You can find this play (“The Interrupted Act”) in a collection called “The Card Index” and Other Plays, translated by Adam Czerniawski, published by Calder and Boyars, London, 1969.)