The newest Polish literature includes few books like this debut - calm and intimate. There are no trendy modern themes here, no political allusions or characters who are front page news, there is no slick language trying to woo the reader. Apart from one secondary episode, there is no Poland and no Poles.
Reisefieber is the story of Daniel, a Swedish man almost forty. He lives in New York, works as a journalist, and even has literary ambitions - he is trying to write, as he puts it, 'a modern novel'. One day he learns of his mother's death, and flies to Europe to deal with any necessary formalities related to his inheritance and the funeral.
Astrid, Daniel's mother, lived in Paris for many years, and he was brought up there. There were just the two of them, no father. Nobody ever mentioned his father. Though Daniel planned to stay just a few days to arrange matters, his stay in Paris and his mother's flat is unexpectedly prolonged. His mind goes back to past events, he relives his youthful years spent with Astrid. And he notices he knows practically nothing about his mother.
First he learns about her final weeks: the illness, the unsuccessful chemotherapy, the suicide attempt - at the last moment she was frightened by a man from the house opposite, who noticed her standing on the windowsill. Later Daniel starts looking for people who knew his mother, he tries to reconstruct her life bit by bit, tries to understand her all over again, as if wanting to make up for what he had failed to do before. He finds Aude, the blind psychotherapist whom Astrid told about her loneliness for years, he tries to meet up with Spencer, a 60-year-old professor who was his mother's last true love.
It's not just past events that are remembered; there are also objects that his mother was using just a short time ago. A few evocative images from this private psychological investigation return over and over: for instance, Daniel wonders how many address books around town still contain her name, and in how many she has already been crossed out. Her voice still resounds from the answering machine in her flat, though she herself is gone. In the end Daniel discovers the taboo Astrid had concealed - just before her death, the mother left her son, with whom she had been out of touch for some years, an important letter.
The more he learns about his mother's life, though, the more often he faces questions of the meaning of his own life. He talks to the young doctor who took care of Astrid about love (his wife, it turns out, is also Swedish), he calls his girlfriend Anna in New York, but though he wants to, he is unable to say anything important to her - the conversation peters out.
It is the mysterious coolness of situations and characters that is the most interesting in Lozinski's narrative. Nobody here is certain of their feelings or reactions, nobody is truly happy, finally, nobody feels fulfilled. What is clear to everybody is that complete communication between two people close to each other is hard or even impossible, just like a conversation about really important things is almost impossible.
Marek Radziwon, wiadomosci.gazeta.pl, June 13, 2007 - Polish version
Mikołaj Łoziński
Reisefieber
SIW Znak, Kraków 2006
130 x 200, 164 pages, hardcover or paperback
ISBN 83-240-0661-3 [5]
www.znak.com.pl