After a therapy session based on the controversial Family Constellations method, a man is killed in a Warsaw monastery. Bert Hellinger, who created this method, claims that strangers taking part in such sessions can feel the emotions of family members whose parts they play. Did someone decide to murder Henryk Talak because their role told them to do it? Or maybe the therapist is to blame?
These are the questions that must be answered by State Prosecutor Teodor Szacki, a man suffering from bureaucratic exhaustion and bored as hell by his marriage. On the road to truth he will not only learn about semi-quackish psychology, but also about political conspiracy theories connected to a murder that took place twenty years earlier.
After Entanglement was published in 2010 Jerzy Pilch wrote:
A great master has appeared in Polish literature: Zygmunt Miłoszewski, a true writer.
The book also received the High Calibre Award at the 5th Crime Story Festival. But for Miłoszewski it was only the beginning: A Grain of Truth, Gniew and Priceless (2013) – a thriller about the search for Raphael Santi's painting, somehow reminiscent of Arturo Perez-Reverte's books – followed.
Miłoszewski's crime stories are not only riddles, but also commentaries on the Polish reality. Each of the novels has an underlying social or political subject – in this regard they are reminiscent of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander cycle. In Entanglement we find the political crimes of the Polish People's Republic and the subsequent obsession with solving their mysteries. In A Grain of Truth Miłoszewski deals with the roots and consequences of Polish anti-semitism, while in Gniew he's concerned with violence against women. Each of these novels is also a portrait of another city: the first part takes place in Warsaw, the second in Sandomierz, the third in Olsztyn.
Both Entanglement and A Grain of Truth have been filmed, the first by Jacek Bromski in 2011 and the second by Borys Lankosz in 2014. While the second film is quite faithful to its literary original, Bromski decided to set the movie in Kraków instead of Warsaw and decided that Teodor Szacki should become a woman.
Entanglement and A Grain of Truth have been published by Bitter Lemon, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
Edited by N. Mętrak-Ruda, October 2015
