Since I’m at the limit of what I can take, of shock and something else I can’t name. Because what I’m hearing is over the top, a stretch, pure ethical flimflam that, in the longer run, is not to be tolerated. Magda takes advantage of the moment of silence between us. She rolls out a monologue on the subject of her goodness, of her devotion, and suddenly she became mad talkative, like a mental whore, like a mental escort.
So says Andrzej “Nails” Robakoski near the beginning of Snow White and Russian Red. He’s a paranoid, lazy, misogynistic and generally unlikable character. But even though he’s the centre of Dorota Masłowska’s first novel, the book itself is surprisingly enjoyable.
This is a quick and dirty book. Released to massive critical acclaim in Poland in 2002, it’s the story of a few speed-fueled days of Nails’s life in his hometown on the Baltic coast. His only interests seem to be speed and sex, and the sex gets more and more complicated after Magda dumps him. He’s also deeply concerned about the war that’s brewing between Poland and the Russians who run the black market.
There’s a war between Poland and Russia? Nails’s hallucinatory narration is so frenetic and detailed that there were times when I wasn’t quite sure whether things were really happening. A girl vomits rocks, the police demand that Nails paint his house in the pattern of a Polish flag—these stories seem implausible, of course, but Nails tells them so convincingly that it’s not always clear. Maybe this takes place in a surreal, alternate version of Poland. Or maybe it’s all in his head. Everything becomes clearer near the end of the book, but the ending is so shocking and surreal that the unsettled feeling stayed with me.
This unnerving quality is the most impressive part of the book. It’s one of those indescribable feelings, like listening to one of your favourite songs for the first time and realizing that it captures an emotion you’ve been feeling for your entire life but have never been able to define.
It’s all due to Masłowska’s writing style. Her sentences are short and snappy, and they come rushing out of Nails’s mouth so quickly that he propels the book along just by talking. This isn’t a book in which a lot happens: Nails spends 300 pages wandering around doing a lot of drugs and trying to get laid. But it doesn’t matter that not much happens, because what’s going on inside his head is so intense.
Critics hailed the book as a masterpiece, and Masłowska as the voice of an entire generation of Poles. It’s not an optimistic portrait of a generation. From Masłowska’s (and Nails’s) perspective, they’re disaffected and confused, born near the end of Communism but reaching adulthood right around the time Poland joined the European Union. I’ve been to Poland, though only as a tourist, and it’s still clearly caught in limbo between Eastern and Western Europe.
Critics also called Masłowska the saviour of Polish literature, an argument that I’m not qualified to judge. (The only other Polish book I’ve read is Witold Gombrowicz’s weird and wonderful 1937 novel Ferdydurke. There are echoes of Gombrowicz in this book, but stylistically it owes more to contemporary drug books and movies like Trainspotting and Requiem For A Dream.)
I suspect that a lot of the hype surrounding this novel comes from the fact that Masłowska was only 18 when it was published. This isn’t to diminish its quality: it’s worth reading, and her writing is youthful without being too juvenile. I’m interested in reading more of her work if and when it’s translated into English.
Addendum: I just discovered that the book was adapted into a film last year, and I’m putting it on my list of films to watch (if I can find a subtitled copy.)
