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Teodor Parnicki, Ostatnia powieść (The Last Novel)






In world literature there is a special category: the Great Unfinished Novel. It comprises such early-20th century classics as Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, Jaroslav Hašek’sTheGood Soldier Švejk, Franz Kafka’s The Castle, and, from more recent times:  Ralph Ellison’s Three Days Before the Shooting and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. Teodor Parnicki’s thousand-page TheLast Novel belongs to this revered company: the Polish author left it uncompleted at the time of his death on December 5, 1988. When it comes to complexity, however, this cognitive overkill of a novel stands out even among the above-mentioned titles. Based on the critical response of those Polish readers who managed to read, let alone digest, this colossal book, I can assume that it has secured the place as the most formidable work of 20th century Polish literature.
Teodor Parnicki is a great unknown for the Anglophone reader as none of his works have bee…

Michael Krüger, The God Behind the Window, Trans. by Karen Leeder and Peter Thompson, University of Chicago Press, 2018.




The thirteen stories of Michael Krüger’s The God behind the Window capture the poignancy and cynicism of late life through tales of misanthropic old men full of the mixture of wisdom and melancholy that so often accompanies old age. In Krüger’s stories, world-weary characters seek—and only temporarily find—solace in nature and culture, rendering their search for a better life simultaneously comedic and heart wrenching. From a solitary hiker in the Swiss Alps to the book’s eponymous shut-in, these aging malcontents are continually surprised by the unexpected interventions of a world that has come to seem predictable. Krüger captures this stage in life masterfully, contrasting the deeply personal emotions of affection, melancholy, and longing with an indifferent world. The resulting stories are lyrical, philosophical, and tender despite their cynicism.

Abel Posse, Dogs of Paradise, Trans. by Margaret Sayers Peden, Trafalgar Square, 1992.
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Brilliant, profound and startlingly comic, here is a transformation of the old stories about the discovery of the Americas by distinguished Argentinian author Abel Posse. Ranging from the decadent Spanish court to the shores of the Mediterranean to the tropical Earthly Paradise, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea triumphantly finds the New World.
The medieval Spanish state and the New World in the early years of its discovery by Europeans are the backdrops for a revisionist historical farce that will be best appreciated by those already familiar with the personalities and events of the period. The disjointed narrative renders with Rabelaisian gusto (and, frequently, crudity) several settings: Aztec and Inca societies; the passionate, cruel court of Isabella and Ferdinand; the lonely wanderings of Christopher Columbus as he moves toward his fateful mission of finding Earthly Paradise. Posse,…

Paolo Volponi, The Worldwide Machine: a novel, Grossman Publishers, 1967.


The essay-novel, or the novel of introspection or symbolic action, has only recently caught on in Italy. Moravia is sexually oriented, the interests of Silone and Vittorini are basically social, and all three employ a more or less realistic immediacy. Paolo Volponi's The World Wide Machine, on the other hand, is closer to Musil and Kafka, to dehydrated prose, indirect representation, and allegorical issues. The first person narrator here exists in the closed world of his own mind, coolly spinning an abstract meditation on the evolutionary drive of the future and the bourgeois olly of the present. For Anteo Crocioni, ""reality has only two terms: man and science."" He is the obsessed utopian, the philosophical scientist without an accomodating bone in his body, the historical martyr whose fancy it is ""that men have been built in the likeness of a machine by other beings who...are…