Nahacz made his debut in 2003 with the novel Osiem Cztery (Eight Four, trans. by A.P.), written before he graduated high school. The book was published by the Czarne publishing house – the writer knew its founders, Andrzej Stasiuk and Monika Sznajderman, from childhood. As Stasiuk recalls:
Eighteen-year-old Mirek Nahacz came to us from a neighbouring village. I thought he came to borrow a book as usual and talk about this and that for a while, as has happened so many times before. This time, however, he didn't want any book, he wasn't very talkative and it seemed as if he came to leave right away. And so he did. But he put something on the table with such a face, as if he was giving back money, that he didn’t want to give. He went, and I thought: God, I hope these aren't poems.
Osiem Cztery delighted Stasiuk and he soon published it. It is a short coming-of-age novel, describing a group of village boys going hiking. Rich in descriptions of narcotic and alcoholic trips, it surprises time with both its style and the distanced, though in a way sensitive, the perspective of the first-person narrator. Nahacz's language is blunt and colloquial, but also plastic and unforced, thanks to which the tension of Osiem Cztery is based on the ironic combination of almost oneiric descriptions with the plot.
After passing his Matura exams, Nahacz moved to Warsaw, where he began studying Cultural Studies at the University of Warsaw and established contacts with the members of the Lampa magazine (the members included Masłowska, to which he was sometimes compared due to his early debut, Drotkiewicz and Sufin). He collaborated with Lampa, but was still published by Stasiuk.
In 2004, he published Bombel, a novel about a village drunkard spinning tales. It was to be based on one of the inhabitants of Nahacz's hometown. The other characters in the novel were also modelled on people he knew from his teenage years. As Mikołaj Lizut wrote, Nahacz was supposed to be stressed by the reception of his books in Gładyszów, Czarne’s office, precisely because he based the characters on real people.
A year later, in 2005, the last book published during the writer's lifetime – the novel Bocian i Lola (Stork and Lola, trans. by A.P.). Jarosław Lipszyc said that it earned Nahacz the title of "Polish Burroughs". Bocian i Lola is set outside the province. Nahacz blurs the contours of the depicted world, mixing orders and ordering the narrator to throw himself in hallucinations, somewhere on the edge of reality. As the author himself described the book:
What are time changers? Does Lola really exist? Will the hallucinations finally be over? Or maybe the end of the world is over? The narrator has a tough nut to crack. Not only does he have to answer all these questions, but he also has to make the journey that apparently someone made up for him., Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, it’s you turn to throw!
Nahacz died on July 21, 2007 by suicide. The writer's last published book was Niezwykłe Przygody Roberta Robura (The Unusual Adventures of Robert Robur, trans. by A.P.), which Czarne refused to publish earlier. Before his death, the author took the unfinished book to the Prószyński i Ska publishing house, whose editors approached the book more graciously and began talks with the writer, interrupted by Nahacz's tragic death. The book was finally published unfinished after his death. The controversial decision of the publishers was partly motivated by the interest on the part of readers, who started to ask whether Prószyński really had the rights to the young writer's last novel and demanded that it be published.
Niezwykłe Przygody Roberta Robura is more extensive than the author's previous books - it is a six-hundred-page novel, more ambitious than Nahacz's previous works. Critics have found inspiration in Pynchon, one of America's most mysterious writers, the pope of postmodern fiction. Nahacz created a monumental novel, multiplying subplots, references, touching upon the subject of television (fashionable in American postmodern novels), finally drawing a fantastic, anti-utopian vision of reality. In 2016, Krzysztof Garbaczewski produced a performance entitled "Robert Robur" at Warsaw's Teatr Rozmaitości, based on Nahacz's latest work, taking the novel's action into the contemporary world of digital media.
Author: Natalia Sajewicz, May 2017; translated by A.P., July 2019.
