Krall follows chronological order to write about the absurdities of communist Poland and about God, about her daughter and literature, about heroism, cowardice, injustice and joys, about the doubts of young age and fears of old age, about history and politics. The people who appear in her book include Krzysztof Kieślowski, Marek Edelman, Mieczysław Rakowski, Father Adam Boniecki, Professor Jan Kott and Professor Leszek Kołakowski.
An outstanding reporter, Krall has surprised her readers with a book which is different and yet very typical of her in combining things big and small, metaphysical and mundane, general and specific. Composed from received letters and postcards, remembered conversations, opinions and memories, it can be said to have been co-written by Krall's friends and acquaintances, characters from her reportages and lovers of her talent, the famous and the unknown, as well as by her husband and her daughter Katarzyna, whose birth opens the book and who reappears on its pages as a schoolgirl writing home from a summer camp, a student in the 1980s, little Michał's mother and finally an emigrant staying at a refugee camp in Ostia.
Detailed and reflective, Pióra offers a vast and amazing panorama of human lives spanning Poland and the USA, Canada, Italy and Israel, and reaching as far as the remote Irkutsk. It is also a precious record of moments which over time acquired a poignant significance.
"Lots of kisses, still alive..." - writes Krzysztof Kieślowski in 1995, two days before he is taken to hospital. "The people of Vershina ask what sorts of things are short in supply in Poland. Is, for instance, a bearskin a suitable gift?" - asks in a letter Natalia N. from the Irkutsk oblast, a teacher who appears in the reportage Kawałek chleba/ A Piece of Bread (1969). "I should study workers' democracy more extensively and in detail" - is the advice offered to Krall by Mieczysław Rakowski in 1970. Anna M., a level crossing attendant, sends a syrup and weather forecast for the year.
In a letter from Rome Father Adam Boniecki "is asking what he should bring. We are to write specifically. It is easier if he is asked for elastic for underpants, a sewing machine needle or a car part." But the same letter also talks about the condition of "Tygodnik Powszechny". Professor Jan Kott shares his unusual reflections on women's underwear (!), while Jan Karski writes: "We are both from the same family - of people."
Naturally, the book brings also a number of Holocaust-related stories, although they are just one element of the collage. The following quotation from Leszek Kołakowski's "On life" could serve as the motto of Pióra:
When you knowingly demand the impossible, there is no good way out. Despite that life is not so awful, you can always find something or other, something good, something exceptionally good, and if we keep insisting on making sense, we can only blame ourselves for being so stubborn.
According to the book's publishers:
It was not until she became a mature reporter that Hanna Krall ventured to address 'the ż-letter issue' ['ż' being the first letter of the Polish word for 'life' - note from the translator], as she and Kieślowski would euphemistically say in their conversations. Stories started to come to her - people began to share them with Krall. Frivolously titled 'Różowe strusie pióra' / 'Pink ostrich feathers', Krall's latest book opens the secrets of her writing more than her previous books did. What she processes and tells in her own words are 'denunciatory reports on reality', and the narrator-reader relationship is just a link in the chain of borrowings, of stories lived and told by a number of people. Contrary to appearances, Krall's narration is never innocently transparent - there is always a gap, a slight divide between the one who speaks and the one who listens and writes down. The task faced by the writer can never be completed, for there are no answers to the questions which arise from the stories.
Różowe strusie pióra' brings an account of H.Z., a literary critic who describes a scene from the Nazi occupation: she sees her best friend being taken to the police station. She wants to wrap her arms around the policeman's shoes and beg him to let her friend go - all in her imagination, however; in reality she is standing still. (Tadeusz Sobolewski, an excerpt from "W komisariacie" / "At the Police Station").
This is a book about what people have been writing and saying to me for fifty years, explains Krall.
Source: www.empik.com, "Wyspa" no. 9/2009 - kwartalnik-wyspa.pl