Szpica: Opowiadania, Warianty, Szkice Book

I thought I was going to love this. It begins so brilliantly. The stories of the individual interconnected lives he focuses on are initially deeply compelling. It's 1943 in Warsaw. The first thing he shows us is how the social hierarchy of Warsaw has changed under the Nazi occupation. Ideally, civilisation is a social order founded on a hierarchy of spirit, sensibility, acumen. A police state enables the uncouth to lord it over their spiritual superiors. Here a former judge is at the mercy of a benign profiteer who has benefitted from the theft of all Jewish property. Power has shifted from the well-educated to the streetwise and unscrupulous. This was brilliantly achieved. We are then shown the close friendship of two young boys, one a Jew, the other a Catholic. Equals in every sense except in the eyes of the Nazis. Again this is brilliantly and poignantly done. The Catholic boy is in love with a neighbour's wife. This is the beautiful Mrs Seidenman. She is Jewish but pretending to be Catholic and is betrayed to the Gestapo by a fellow Jew. The Nazi is another example of the triumph of mediocrity. He has no special gift except a willingness to unquestioningly follow orders. It's often overlooked in the face of their innumerable crimes that the Nazis also sought to annihilate intellect and sensibility.

I suspect Anthony Marra is a fan of this novel as he copies (and improves) Szczypiorski's tactic of linking disparate characters with a single hidden thread and also telling us early on how their lives will pan out in the future. Thus we learn how each character will die early on in their narrative. This didn't bother me so much as Szczypiorski's penchant for abandoning the personal in favour of the philosophical and political. It soon becomes a novel of ideas. And for me the ideas began sucking all drama from the narrative. I grew less and less impressed with his narrative skills. For me too much attention was paid to the post war political convulsions Poland suffers and the novel began at times to read like an essay. Five stars for the first hundred pages but, though it was very wise and brilliantly written, it all ended up a bit lifeless for me. You could call it a disenchanted love letter to Poland. 3.5 stars.