Book cover
The US literary magazine Kirkus Review has included My First Suicide among its 100 top books of 2012
Jerzy Pilch's novel was published in its English edition, translated by David Frick, in April 2012 by Open Letter publishers. Kirkus Review, in circulation since 1933, reviewed the book in May, calling it a "set of loosely concatenated stories that don’t quite add up to a novel but are nonetheless rich in character and in the exploration of contemporary urban life in Poland". It tells the story of a man in his fifties, who thinks back to the first time he'd first thought of killing himself. He uses the excuse of his own self-destruction to indulge in a few activities he would have considered taboo otherwise, creating a humorous story rooted in the darker moments of everyday existence. Kirkus Review sums up its review with "It’s hard to do justice to the outré and eccentric but gorgeous quality of Pilch’s prose. Here he manages to pull off some neat literary tricks, frequently and self-consciously undermining the seriousness of his subjects with pricks of irony".
The novel is the author's fourth on the American market and the third to be featured on Kirkus Review, after The Mighty Angel, translated by Bill Johnston, and A Thousand Peaceful Cities, also translated by David Frick. In 2010 The Mighty Angel was on the 2010 Best of Fiction list, while that following year A Thousand Peaceful Cities was nominated for the Three Percent's Best Translated Book Award, an initiative for promoting international literature at the University of Rochester.
Alongside Pilch, the other authors recommended in the Best Fiction of 2012 include Hilary Mantel, Mario Vargasa Llosy and Alice Munro. Pilch's humble reaction to the news lavished most of the praise on his translator, whom he calls a "rather unusual person. A Professor at Berkeley, who leads translation workshops with his students, translating into English various things, such as 17th -century court appeals in Vilnius", shared the author with the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper, adding "Rankings are fine, but when Frick says: 'I have read it and now I must translate it' - that's something else".
Jerzy Pilch (born 1952) started out as a columnist for the Tygodnik Powszechny weekly based in Kraków. His first few novels weren't smash successes, but his big break came when he moved to Warsaw and began working for the Polityka weekly, while working on his novel in his spare time. That novel, The Mighty Angel, was praised by critics and awarded the NIKE, Poland's most eminent literary prize, in 2009. Considered Poland’s most famous story of alcoholism, it is compared to Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano and Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow-Petushki. The English translation by Bill Johnston was published in 2009. In 2012 film director Wojciec Smarzowski began making a film based on the book, titled Angel.
See the full list of Kirkus Review's Best Fiction of 2012
Editor: Agnieszka Le Nart
Source: Kirkus Review