Let’s start with a small autopsy of the author (readers of Zbrodniarz i dziewczyna will quickly see that it’s a novel full of details from the dissection room).
First cut and a distilled element: Witkowski as a phenomenon, a media personality with an ‘aura of glamour’. In every interview he says things which make people angry, make them laugh or provoke an ironic sigh from the critics in ‘corduroy jackets’. He shines at fashion weeks, has his own fashion blog, and wears flower garlands and creations by Polish designers.
Second cut: Witkowski as a writer. An exceptional writer, even though he himself thinks he’s not one anymore, since it’s a label, which – in the same way as ‘gay’ – constrains him. He says he wants to limit himself to producing one book every two years.
If I call myself a writer, I practically cut out everything else. Everyone starts having certain expectations. I cannot be stupid anymore, do unimportant things, sing, do fashion. – he said in an interview with Newsweek.
Zbrodniarz i dziewczyna / The Criminal and the Girl can be read in two different ways. The media buzz can be treated as a seasoning, and one can read it through the prism of creation and performance by Miss Gizzi (M.W.’s fashion nickname). One can wonder who the hell the writer is or could be today. One can also – as I did – read this book, without knowing what’s happening on the gossip sites, and have enough of an experience with the text itself.
And this is what happens in the text: Michaśka, MW’s literary alter ego, returns. This time we meet her not in the out-of-season Międzyzdroje, but in her hometown of Wrocław between November and December. She’s fat because of antidepressants, tortured everyday by her personal trainer and, what’s most important for the plot, unhappily in love and at the same time noticing with some satisfaction – in a comic, autotelic gesture – that all dramatic love stories can be used ‘in prose’.
The plot, evolving slowly on the few first pages, is like the calm of prozac before the storm. In Wrocław a serial 'retrokiller' is on the prowl, putting the bodies of his victims in pre-war chalets, dressing them up in vintage clothes and – as we learn at the very beginning – hunting the unaware Michaśka as a psycho-fan. Since she knows the chalet-picket context, she has to start collaborating with the police in the hunt for the sartorialist-psychopath.
There’s crime, there’s gothic, there’s vintage, as in Drwal / Lumberjack (2011). Zbrodniarz i dziewczyna is the second part of the black Michaśka series, which – as Witkowski says in his interviews – will consist of three novels. The same protagonists appear in the background, the play with genres is similar as well as melancholic, dark references to the interwar period (although the title and some narrative elements are inspired by Nesfeter’s film Zbrodniarz i panna / The Criminal and the Maiden with Cybulski and Krzyżewska). Witkowski is a bit of an auto-cannibal who feeds on himself, his narcissism and everything he invented before. This time Międzyzdroje in November is replaced by a more and more western “meeting place”, where macabre murders can only happen in German villas and pre-war chalets.
Zbrodniarz i dziewczyna is a continuation of the first volume, so a reader who doesn’t know the first part of the series might feel a little bit disoriented. The action unravels slowly in an unknown direction and branches out (for example it goes to Międzyzdroje, to later return to Wrocław once again) and the whole narrative is filled with knowing winks to those who understand Michaśka’s universe. The narrative, compared to Drwal, is slower, more excursive, and Michaśka is much less focused. Sometimes she talks too much, sometimes her stories could be shortened, sometimes the plot loses its focus. What can I say? Michał Witkowski is not a master of the crime novel.
But so what? Even when Witkowski doesn’t totally succeed, his prose doesn’t cease to be pleasurable. Both narcissistic and self-derisive, funny and tragic, exciting even with – or maybe mostly because of – the excursions, secondary plots, monologues by Michaśka’s friend Paula and cogitations about diet and physical condition.
Witkowski has an incredible talent of hoaxing the reader with his logomania, of making ‘something’ out of nothing, moving with charm from glamour to the gym and the rubbish bin. At the same time he writes casually, lazily, dosing his talent as if in passing.
And yet Zbrodniarz i dziewczyna is not only fun and games. Compared to Drwal, it’s a much darker book, filled with – intended or not – existential horror. There is a ‘bonus’ – the body. It’s a baroque, cadaverous novel, filled with detailed descriptions of dissection, blood and guts, and dead bodies with surprisingly calm faces. You could venture to say that no one else has written about dead, rotting bodies and postmortem lividity with such empathy as Witkowski. It might be a hoax, a joke, it might be grotesque, but Zbrodniarz i dziewczyna leaves a surprising elegiac, existential sediment and sadness, caused by the cadaverous chillout. And cold sweat, because, even though the plot is sometimes overloaded, Witkowski succeeded in inducing fear: especially on the last pages, when we see the tailor hunting and working.
Witkowski is a sweet and sour icing on the cake of Polish literature. He’s great when he’s having fun and when he juggles with convention, when he stylizes and moans, when he’s delighted, when he’s serious and when he mocks. It’s quite possible to hate him, be disgusted by his show, irritated by his manner, accuse him of over-stylization. But it’s impossible to deny his great talent. It’s a voice that either annoys or delights, but cannot be confused with any other.
As Janusz Głowacki said in the programme Kulisy sławy / Fame’s Backstage on TVN channel:
One should draw some pleasure from writing and doing what one does.
One should also draw pleasure from reading, and Witkowski is a dependable source of this pleasure.
Author: Aleksandra Lipczak, May 2014, translated by: N. Mętrak-Ruda, December 2015.
Michał Witkowski
Zbrodniarz i dziewczyna / The Criminal and the Girl
Wydawnictwo Świat Książki
Published on May 21st 2014.
ISBN: 9788379432844
432 pages