Paweł Potoroczyn’s literary debut, Ludzka rzecz / A Human Thing, owes much to the conventions of the epic crime novel, intertwining Poland’s fascinating history and geography with unreserved erotic scenes and humour
Ludzka rzecz is described by the publisher as a piece of writing that takes on an epic scale to describe the tumultous fates of the townspeople of Piórków. Human weaknesses and passions are at play, with humour and wise cogitations on life, which is both a fleeting and beautiful phenomenon. The primary action takes place during the Second World War, but numerous digressions and the genealogies of novel's characters take readers to the distant past, and into the present and future.
Dariusz Nowacki, a journalist for the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, writes of the book in his review, Dawno temu pod Częstochową / A Long Time Ago Near Częstochowa:
The story unravels on three different time planes. The actual reality is the day of the burial of Jasio, aka Smyczek - the main protagonist of the novel. This is towards the end of World War II, around the year 1944. The book’s finale presents a brief review of the events that took place from the aforementioned funeral to the year 1948. The main anecdote material is the past - both that of Smyczek, and of other characters that live in Piórkowo and its environs. The author provided some of these characters with a two or three generations of ancestry.
According to Nowacki, these fantastic, incredibly colourful and stylised genealogies are the gem of the novel. The protagonist of A Human Thing is Smyczek:
Smyczek is a notorious villain, the local gangster and an unparalleled lover, who didn’t miss out on a single girl in the region. And none regretted having encountered this sex demon. Even before the war, he met a woman with a similiar nature - the wife of Piórkowo’s baker, who, in her awe for Smyczek’s art of love, stifled her old husband with a pillow.
The strange fates and tales of the characters in the novel's multiple plots encompass Poles, Jews, Gypsies, Austrians, Hungarians, Italians, Russians, Japanese, and Catholics, atheists, hetero and homosexuals. And, as noted by Jacek Cieślak from the newspaper Rzeczpospolita, the author isn’t surprised by anyone, but observes them all with philosophical reverie, as indicated in the title of the novel. Cieślak writes in his review Pikantny traktat o naturze Polski / A Spicy Treatise on Poland’s Nature:
The abundance of events and characters is so huge, that it brings to mind Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. For the Polish readership, what's most important is the fact that Potoroczyn, who sets the events of the book against the background of the Second World War, avoids a martyrological reverie, and instead creates probably the first ever glorification of Poland’s ever-cursed geographic location. It lays ground for a mingling of bloods, races, and religions - an explosive mixture whose name is Poland.
In his Gazeta Wyborcza review, Dariusz Nowacki sees the form of a Lumieres-system philosophical novel as the key context for A Human Thing. He suggests that a reverie on the strangeness of being dominates Potoroczyn’s work:
[…] it’s worth adding that it is a reverie intelligently blended with some sort of a lenience for the usually imperfect human nature. Yet the book owes the most to an equally archaic epic convention - that of the crime novel. We are presented with it in a rather interesting variation. Why, we get the German occupation and the forest-partisan activities portrayed as - I don’t hesitate to say - a form of spending free time.
Nowacki also notes the abundance of issues touched on by the novel, as well as its bold sensuality, a flirtatious erotica that is an asset and doesn’t stoop to vulgarity. In his jacket-cover note for A Human Thing, Tadeusz Konwicki underscores the polymorphous matter of the novel, pointing to a couple of mini-stories and a set of mini-treatises, and Rzeczpospolita’s Cieślak addresses similar points in his judgement of A Human Thing:
While writing a sensual and spicy piece of prose, the motor of which is mainly erotic, Potoroczyn has created a series of digressing treatises. He analyses the phenomenon of our spring and the meaning of Polish mud. We have a dissertation on the passing of gasses. And even the history of the Soviet Army’s struggle seen from the perspective of a medal factory.
Paweł Potoroczyn is a diplomat and cultural manager, as well as a music producer and publisher, and has directed the Adam Mickiewicz Institute since 2008. He is a graduate of the Department of Philosophy of the University of Warsaw, where he also read history. Potoroczyn began his public service in 1992 as President of the Polish Information Agency, and his diplomatic service began as took the post of the Cultural Consul at the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Los Angeles. He is the founder and first director of the Polish Cultural Institute in New York, and was director of the Polish Cultural Institute in London from 2005. Potoroczyn has published extensively in the newspaper Rzeczpospolita and magazines such as Tygodnik Powszechny and Brief. A Human Thing, published by W.A.B., the Warsaw-based publishing house, is his litearary debut.
Ludzka rzecz / A Human Thing
Paweł Potoroczyn
publishing date April 2013
W.A.B.
123 x 195 mm
352 pgs
ISBN 978-83-7747-833-2
Editor: Mikołaj Glinśki, translated by Paulina Schlosser, 25.04.2013
Source: Wyborcza.pl, Rzeczpospolita, W.A.B.