Magdalena Tulli - Objects and buildings circulate randomly and mingle with one another, memory must constantly untangle them

Magdalena Tulli, Dreams and Stones, Trans. By Bill Johnston (Archipelago Books, 2004 )

"When Dreams and Stones (Sny i kamienie) first appeared in 1995, it was immediately hailed as one of the most brilliant contributions to the literature of Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of communism, winning the prestigious Koscielski Foundation Prize in Poland. The novel/prose poem's haunting lyricism truly breaks new literary ground, and comparisons have been made between her work and the stories of Bruno Schulz.
Tulli tells the story of the growth of a great city. Though never spelled out in the narrative, she is writing about Warsaw. The entire city was rebuilt after its complete destruction in World War Two; Tulli relates this history by entering the lives of the stones from which the buildings and monuments are constructed, as well as inhabiting the dreams of people and objects interwoven within the city's history. Tulli reveals the inner lives of edifices, mirrors, and newspaper photographs, while she explores the design of the city, its growth and its workings. Is it a living organism or is it a highly complex piece of machinery? Tulli dismantles the city piece by piece to reveal a very different metaphysical landscape lying, literally, beneath and around."

"Powerful imagery caught in a sinewy, architectural, elegiac prose. An inner-outer dance of cityscape with the taut emotion, terror & psyche of the 'human.' Where are we? What magical zone of dream and stone? We are inhabitants of the wild, brilliant imagination of Magdalena Tulli. This book is a great pleasure to read: deeply provocative, intuitive, haunting. 'I hunt among stones' was Charles Olson's probing line, a mission manifested here with full beauty & finesse." - Anne Waldman

"Dreams and Stones is a startling, beautiful, powerful achievement. It calls the conventional genres of literature into question as its central image and metaphor, 'the tree of the world,' grows, spreads and deepens. It does away with the persistent superstition of humanity's distinction from 'nature.' " - W. S. Merwin

"Dreams and Stones dexterously braids cords of memory, imagination, and elegiac intensity, as she give us the story of the founding and development of a major city and, by extension of all cities: a brilliant tale of “these interpenetrating spaces” that become “ever more confused, entangled, diffuse.” Tulli manages with apparent ease to parse the shifting urban amalgam she posits into complementary component parts that are rendered with great exactitude: “The city of yesterday and the city of today can seem like a pair of identical looking pictures from a puzzle in which on closer inspection one may find a flag missing from a rooftop, an additional flowerpot on a windowsill or one more sparrow upon a ledge.”
Like all cities, Tulli’ has a many coexisting, mutually coloring layers as mica. Zones of joy and sorrow overlap, rise out of each other. There are beautiful dreams evoked and, of course (not least, one supposes, because of the ravages of the 20th century) horrible ones. The generative and destructive nature of time is accordingly speculated upon: “Is it that which turns the cogs of clocks or that which the clocks crush in their cogs?” Part of great power of the writing derives from Tulli’s unusually limber, absolutely authoritative prose line. It never for a moment falters as her city of dreams and stones and steel, grows and contracts, turns inward, outward, rushes on." - Laird Hunt

"Dreams and Stones is a fantastical fiction, its subject a nameless city. It is mainly descriptive: there is no sequence of incidents of the sort that usually carry a novel forward. Other than the city itself there are no characters - just anonymous masses of inhabitants and workmen and the like, with no individuals standing out.
Dreams and Stones reads almost like a lyrical essay, but it drifts beyond that. It is fantastical, a work of the imagination that sees in the city much beyond the everyday and real: it's an interpretation that goes far beyond familiar urban realities.
The book is rich in fertile imagery, the city never static but rather in a state of constant, swelling metamorphosis. Growth and change are both organic and industrial, something Tulli conveys particularly well.
Many of her images and descriptions are striking, as is her ability to keep the reader from fixing on any single one. The world - this world, especially - is in constant flux, and the scenes can not be captured with photographic precision, blurring just at the moment when the scene seems to come into focus. Fans of naturalism will not be pleased, but it's an effective representation of urban (and historical) memory:
Objects and buildings circulate randomly and mingle with one another. Memory must constantly untangle them since permanent order is not possible there. The city can neither be described nor drawn; the reality of the city blocks is resistant to orthogonal projection.
The city is to some extent situated in contemporary European topography, connexions to Paris and St. Petersburg and elsewhere reflecting back and helping in defining it. Presumably, in fact, the city is Warsaw, but Tulli's cityscape is near-universal: particulars may differ, but what interests her about the living entities that cities are can be expressed more generally. Specifically, the constantly changing city - different from every perspective and every person's place within (and without) it - mirrors life and memory itself. It's one way of looking at the common conundrum:
In this city of changes, ruled by memory, there had to be room for everything that memory has retained, yet every day its contents are reduced to shreds a little more.
Tulli's wild vision sometimes goes too far, as when she describes dark stars in the sky, invisible because:
They were smashed to pieces by the helicopters of the municipal transit system which were roaming aimlessly beneath the vault of the sky without fuel, which they could not refill since there was nowhere to land: The landing pads on the rooftops had never been built and now they were overgrown with dense jungles of antennas.
But elsewhere she impresses greatly. There are many simple yet effective images:
With time the buildings took on the same shade of gray as the cloudy sky and in this manner disappeared.
And there are also more elaborate but similarly effective descriptions:
At dusk the city of dreams and the city extending in space become one and join in a murky whole crowned by the black silhouettes of office buildings against a reddish sky, giant edifices constructed not long ago yet already affected by corrosion and darkness. Nowhere is there any boundary marker, inscription or informational sign that would indicate the relative positions of dreams and waking life. Some take the ringing of alarm clocks in the morning as a signal indicating the crossing of the border. But alarm clocks which themselves belong to dreams cannot wake people from them.
Readers should be aware of what they are getting themselves into: Dreams and Stones is an almost plot-less novel of description. Romance, action, dramatic arc are absent. But for those who don't mind that, it's certainly worthwhile: Tulli does what she does very well, her meditation on memory and the cityscape an often fascinating, wildly-imagined, and well-conveyed one." - The Complete Review

"Architecture, dreams, life, lines and asphalt is where Magdalena Tulli takes the readers of Dreams and Stones. Along for the ride of a city, where the stones of reality will fall, but only the dreams survive. Life will always be imperfect, but dreams they can be what you make of them.
Magdalena Tulli could take the most hideously boring subject and write beautiful sentences. I adore her writing, it is deep, intense and ambiguous. She dares to go places that her readers may not be able to follow, yet she fear not as she takes them there. Dreams and Stones is a balance between the mystical dream world and the harsh reality of life. Life is too real, dreams are too far gone. I could drool over this book, there are certain key sentences which I will share, that might as well be screaming "I CAN'T BELIEVE NO ONE HAS WRITTEN ME YET!!!!", but she does, and does it with ease and a tenderness that willingly ushers the reader into a new place.
In saying all that, I can come clean and say that a lot of her writing was very deep for me, or just too hard for me to grasp. I love strange and weird and unsettling, however I am not fully able to comprehend what was hard for me about this book. Tulli's writing is incredible, yet many times I just had no idea where she had taken me and what she was writing about. I felt as though it were poetry in form of prose, which would make sense because so much of poetry is how it speaks to the individual, therefore making poetry on the hard-to-understand side sometimes. Throughout the book I was rocked out of my seat with her writing, others I was only holding on by a molecule. It could be that it was too philosophical for me, I am not sure.
The writing, it is heaven though, here are two quotes from the book:
Eventually the day came when the sofas were chopped up for firewood; a stray shell released the letters from their drawers. Paper turned to ashes, windowpanes shattered, door frames and tiled stoves were smashed to pieces. But this too failed to stop the pain. For pain does not belong to those who experience it but rather they belong to it.
But their brightness always arises from darkness and their beauty from horror. The tangle of dreams, untouched by pruning shears, fills the whole world; it can even be said that it is the world and that the inhabitants of the city - along with their houses, their beds, their blankets, their recollections and their unanswerable questions- are only necessary for the dreams to be dreamed.
Only for dreams to be dreamed? What about maintaining order in the world? What about polishing floors, making repairs? Surely the reason why people sleep at night is to gather strength for the labors of the day?
If you have read this book, leave a comment with the link to your review... I'd love to link to it!" - bethany (dreadlock girl)

"Magdalena Tulli’s book Dreams and Stones has been hailed as one of the most extraordinary books written after the fall of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe. It’s writing has been compared to that of her compatriot Bruno Schulz, and to that of Kafka, who himself had been a source of inspiration for Schulz. These kinds of comparisons are common when we encounter a new voice and feel the need to define it in some way, and since the only way we can pin it down is by encapsulating it into something we are familiar with, we always summon these familiar voices as a measure for the unknown. We think that because Tulli and Schulz share the same language and geographical space (Poland), one must have inspired the other; we think that because Kafka and Schulz were both Jews from Central Europe, they must have similar voices and world views. And we are not entirely wrong.
But for whoever takes the time to read these authors with an attention that goes beyond our comfortable assumptions, it becomes clear that they are also very different from each other. Kafka and Schulz were indeed almost contemporaries and the Jewish ethos streaming underneath their stories is recognizable as the same, but their style couldn’t be more different. While Kafka’s fight against idolatry, that is, the “lie” which any work of art is in its essence, is materialized in an austere style, Schulz’s style could be described as almost baroque. When we read Schulz, the influence of the surrealist writers who were his contemporaries is as undeniable as the presence of certain Kafkaesque themes: the authority of the father and the desire to overthrow it, the human metamorphosis into an insect, which in Schulz is taken to an extreme, for it is the father who is transformed into an insect. Shulz is a combination of surrealist aesthetics, Kafkaesque inner conflicts stripped of their religious anguish and Kafkaesque absurdness turned into grotesque humor. As for Kafka himself, one cannot recognize any influence in his writing; if there is any, it is not an influence; rather, it is distilled Judaism.
And what about Magdalena Tulli? As flattering as the comparison with these masters might be, I am not sure that it is entirely accurate. Like most comparisons, it too is based on something true: Tulli’s Dreams and Stones, a fictional prose poem or a poetic fiction, is reminiscent of Kafka’s parables in that the story seems to be telling much more than its surface lets appear; and it is reminiscent of Schulz in its unbound imagination and metaphoric associations. But its theme is remote from the concerns that the two Jewish writers had at the time when the lived and wrote. It is a theme that in today’s academic circles is described as nature versus culture or narrative versus technology, and which has been clothed in a jargon entirely absent from Tulli’s book - for, like any true creation, Dreams and Stones creates its own language as it re-creates the world. And because we often perceive things only in the shell we are accustomed to, we may fail to see what this book is about. Tulli’s countrymen say it is about a city, namely Warsaw, and they are probably right. But for those of us who do not know Warsaw, the book is no less vivid: the city it describes is not only Warsaw, but any city, a mythical city whose history replicates the history of civilization and the intricate relation between nature and artifact residing at the core of all societies. Knowing that Tulli has translate Calvino into Polish also reminds us that Calvino is the author of Invisible Cities, a collection of fable-like tales, whose narrator takes us through the labyrinth of the numerous cities he has passed through, all with names of women, all elusive and desirable as the women whose names they bear.
Dreams and Stones begins with the description of “the tree of the world,” which brings to mind the mythical image of the tree of life or of axis mundi. The tree, however, is not only he tree of life; it appears that it may also be the tree of death. The tree, which grows like all trees above the ground, has a “countertree,” which grows “into the depths of the earth,” dark and full of vermin. A rushed reading might conclude from here that we are dealing with the classical opposition between life and death, but Tulli’s story is much more complex than this. The opposition is between the visible and the invisible, between being and nonbeing, between that which is and that which could be, between the conscious and the unconscious, between the real and the imaginary. Moreover, each fruit of the tree contains in itself the possibility of the countertree. Which also means that the two sets of oppositions are rather sides of the same whole… From the image of the tree and its countertree, Tulli’s book slowly takes us to the universe of the city. Each fruit from the tree encloses a city. Each city and every single thing in it are “the embodiment of a singular possibility from the register of the possible.” For every thing that is, another thing has been “taken away.” In order for something to exist as a unique form, another possibility has been tossed away. Existence is built on the loss of its counterpart – imaginary existence. For example a river triggers in the imagination of the city’s inhabitants the desire to create another river, whose characteristics are opposite those of the first river. And so, the city “contains within itself all possibilities at once, and the entire plan of the world.” ...By the end of the story, the inhabitants realize that cleaning and repairing the city is not sufficient. Repairing only what can be touched does not take care of the invisible countercity, which influences the whole. The invisible is made of the flow of nouns, adjectives, verbs, and rules that link all ideas into a story. It may be, suggests Tulli, that the city and the world, i.e., the visible, exist only to make it possible for the inhabitants to dream their dreams." - Daniela Hurezanu

"Dreams and Stones is a postmodernist masterpiece of lyrical prose that defies generic definition and is rife with paradox and metaphor. Lacking characters and a clear narrative, it is non-linear and frequently non-rational. The world of Dreams and Stones is one in which nothing can be fully known, the past has left half-forgotten and distorted yet transformative traces on everything, and every word contains its opposite. Striving towards utopia inevitably flags and becomes weariness, sickness, and ultimately corruption and debauchery, as the enthusiasm of constructing a new order is transformed into sorrow. Continued disillusionment leads to cruelty and violence, which hasten the city’s demise. The disintegrating metropolis collapses, in the end, into an apocalyptic nightmare of miry swamps, torrid heat, ice, and floods.
Every city, for Tulli, is composed of dreams and stones. Dreams include thought, memory, and language, which are boundless, intangible, and invaluable. However, they are also impermanent. Thoughts and memories are like sunken coins in the cold black “groundwaters of oblivion”, which slowly wear them down, heedless of the principles of reason. The city of dreams is a city of death, but it alone has human value. The language of memory also dissolves as time passes, and Tulli gives this linguistic fragmentation imaginative physical form. The W and A—presumably of WARSAW—for instance, are broken letters of shattered words that have been dispersed far and wide in both time and space. They can be seen in the form of the roofs and steeples of the city destroyed by war; the spikes of rickety fences in the city of today; and the Arch of Triumph and Eiffel Tower in Paris. Just as language leaves its detritus on the cityscape, the city of yesterday is inseparable from the city of today. The many fractured layers of the city’s history overlap on its geography.
Countless memories were lost when the “city of furnishings” became the “city of excavations,” i.e., when “a vast bomb crater” appeared in the city’s heart and fires raged through it, destroying dreams, lives, and things. Yet many memories nonetheless survived into the ensuing period of optimistic reconstruction, when time seemed to be accelerated. People demonstrated faith, strength, and bravery as they dedicated themselves to labor to attain their beautiful dream of the future. Though faded and distorted, memories of this era and the subsequent failure of its ideal live on in the contemporary city of corruption, drugs, and American banks.
Whereas dreams, like nature, are ephemeral, yet living and unique, the stones of cities are permanent and tangible, but not alive. Though they possess neither language nor memory, they blindly and mutely observe the life of the city, as do the stone statues built in the early years of communism with their “protruding eyes without pupils”. Only the stones, which are outside time and language, will continue to exist, “a steadfast endurance free of any name”. Dreams and memories may disappear, but the city’s stones, for the most part, will remain. And even if they should fall or crumble to dust, they are always free of coercion and emotion, unlike the inhabitants of cities, who succumb to oppression and suffering.
Tulli’s vision of the world and the growth/construction of the ideal city are founded on two central metaphors: the city as a tree and the city as a machine. At first she criticizes the (Communist) builders for envisioning the city as a machine in which every part is replaceable. She then appropriates that metaphor, however, and describes the building of the utopian city as the construction of an intricate complex of machinery. The futuristic city’s mechanisms are so complicated that multiple breakdowns are inevitable, replacement parts cannot be found, no one is able to repair the damage, and eventually the city-machine begins to fall apart. It is the desire for utopia itself—the constant effort to dispel disorder from the world—that paradoxically creates more chaos, or what Tulli terms the influx of the “countercity.” Even the artificial stars n the sky go black, and sooty dust descends upon the dark metropolis. Not only the city, but the entire universe is nothing but junk.
For Tulli, however, those who compare the city to a tree are not only enemies, but also brothers of those who see it as a machine, for the manmade and the organic are always interconnected. As the world dies, each individual is alienated within a distinct city showering her not only with crumbling plaster, but also with dead leaves. The nature motif returns here, near the end of the book, echoing the first paragraph, which describes the tree of the world. Here too the natural and the inorganic mingle: when the tree of the world loses its leaves, they turn brown like “pieces of paper turned to ash or rusted-though tin cans”. The metaphors of “tree” and “machine” are inseparable; they are the obverse and reverse of a single coin, like good and evil, life and death, Tulli asserts.
Dreams and Stones is a difficult book, but it merits and rewards close readings and re-readings. Anyone interested in contemporary central European literature, or in post-Communism or postmodernism in general, will be deeply impressed by this brilliant elegiac work. But is it too complex for undergraduates? I taught it and found that about half my students didn’t like it because it was too difficult, while the remainder enjoyed it very much (though there was a lot that they didn’t understand). Some contextual background, close reading, analysis, and discussion helped them to appreciate the text, and at the end of the semester two students said it was their favorite reading of the course. I would, therefore, recommend it for undergraduates as well as advanced students, provided that the need for essential historical background and substantial guidance in interpretation is recognized." - Kirsten Lodge

Magdalena Tulli, Moving Parts, Trans.by Bill Johnston (Archipelago Books, 2005)
"The second of Tulli’s works published by Archipelago, Moving Parts is an invigorating puzzle of grammar and narrative that takes the reader on a fantastic journey through the last hundred years of European history without ever leaving the confines of a hotel. This curious building contains an impossible number of floors, trapdoors, and tunnels that seem to be the architecture of the story itself as well as the whole world. We follow here a nameless narrator who “would prefer not to tell about anything at all,” and who is not the book’s narrator but has been paid to narrate a certain plot, a banal tale involving a love triangle and an argument in a garden. This narrator gets bored, sidetracked, and ultimately lost as he struggles to maintain his hold on a story in which characters mutate or complain about their story line, other narrators of other stories get in the way, and a trapdoor in the hotel’s basement leads to the house in which the story he is supposed to tell is unfolding—which leads to a subterranean train, which leads to a bar, which leads to a tunnel, which leads to an apartment building during World War II, which leads to an elevator, which leads to something pretty close to hell on earth. Because he is not a reader or character, our narrator can move behind the scenes of the hotel—which stand in for the constructed realities of narrative and history—with a set of keys that open doors to other places and times; but he is finally as powerless as anyone to understand or affect the nightmare of the world he confronts. In its surprising movements through history, space, and language, Moving Parts is an incisive social commentary that suggests how crucial it is we pay attention to dominant structures of narrative in literature and life."

"In Moving Parts a feckless, comical narrator struggles against all odds to tell a story for which he is responsible, but which he neither controls nor understands. His characters multiply, repeat, and go astray; his employer is paying no attention, asleep in a drunken stupor. The increasingly desperate narrator clambers over rooftops and through underground passages, watching helplessly as his characters reappear in different times and settings and start rival stories against his will.
This thought-provoking, wryly humorous work tells of the sadness of the world and of the inadequate means that language and storytelling offer us for describing and understanding it. Yet it does so in Tulli's characteristically clear, concrete, gorgeous prose, and, as with Dreams and Stones, the book is a delight to read. Moving Parts was shortlisted for the 2004 Nike Prize, Poland's most prestigious literary award."

"This is a ghosted book: event and object haunt the pages as grammar pulls and rejects pieces if the plot like a confused magnet hovering over the mother lode. Language glides toward the inhospitable future as it stumbles over the cluttered past, but grammar’s structures cannot hold back the forces of personal loss, war, and whatever it is that is known as ‘the human condition.’ The moving parts of time/verb/image/story/character shift below our feet, endlessly rearrangeable in a terrifyingly prolific machine. As Tulli demonstrates with a quick swish of the knives, ‘story’ can keep peeling off from itself and regenerating, like a snake with ever renewable skin." - Eleni Sikelianos

"Masquerading as a novel, [it] is actually a brain-teasing meditation on the conventions of fiction and the strategies of grammar. In an unspecified, presumably Eastern European city, in an unspecified contemporaneous time, a handful of vaguely menacing, deliberately generic characters - a businessman, a red-haired woman, a "grinning hipster in a studded leather jacket" - behave like gnomic ciphers. Spinning the tale, such as it is, is a completely baffled narrator, straight out of a kind of Kafka-meets-Beckett spoof. A nose gets punched, a love affair probably occurs, cabs depart-as will any reader hoping for any kind of conventional story. Here, plot, character development, emotional catharsis and dialogue are sacrificed to Tulli's arcane musings about how her narrator can't rein in the words that threaten to erupt and seize control of the narrative: "All he can do, and that only to a certain degree, is to govern grammatical forms, especially as concerns the verbs, which are constantly striving to escape into open space." In the 1980s, when poststructuralism was the rage, this sort of metafiction at least was startling. Now, it's merely perplexing. After a while, however, once the thorny commentary about subordinate clauses is hurdled, Tulli's snapshot vignettes - of trains covered with "bright zigzags of graffiti," of "a fur that gives off the oppressive smell of mothballs," of a hobo who "rakes cigarettes out of his hair" - can be read as lapidary, Cubist poetry or a word collage that's amorphously if resonantly evocative. Evocative of exactly what, however, is the question. Erudite fans of postmodernist language gamesmay find this thrilling, but it's a decidedly acquired taste." - Kirkus Reviews

"One of the most gifted of contemporary European writers, Magdalena Tulli creates an intricate and, ultimately, inhospitable fictional world in her unsettling and fine novel Moving Parts. Tulli has been hailed as the “new Bruno Schulz,” but her literary heritage extends back to Franz Kafka, and her prose evokes the illusive and deceptive “reality” encountered in Nikolai Gogol’s later prose. Her nearest “relatives” among current authors include Cuban-born Italian writer Italo Calvino and American novelist Don de Lillo, the latter sharing Tulli’s strong sense of unease and impending disaster.
Tulli’s most distinctive contribution to modern letters may well be her hapless narrator, who loses all control over “his” text in the course of Moving Parts. Gogol’s narrator maintains ironic dominance over text and reader, while Schulz features a first-person narrator whose perceptions shape the readers’ reactions. But Tulli’s narrator can only observe helplessly as his world flies apart, a casualty of fictional centrifugal force with a “center that does not hold.” That her narrator is male, not female like the author herself, injects yet another disquieting note. The uncertain fictional world she creates in Moving Parts brings to mind the world of Eastern and Central Europe, or societies undergoing far-reaching changes. Tulli leaves the reader in a void, completely unlike the solid ground we encounter in the realist novel of the nineteenth century. Characters appear fleetingly and uncertainly, their fates unclear. They float in a nebulous space beyond the narrator’s control, perhaps even out of the reach of the author herself.
To underscore the insecurity of her fictional universe, Tulli typically depicts characters on the run. We encounter them in hotels—away from home—underscoring their vulnerability. When they are at home, their relationships unravel as the readers, uncomfortable witnesses to familial collapse, observe helplessly. Not even the narrator, the traditional locus of authority in fictional works, retains any sense of constancy or security.
Tulli combines homelessness with a universe gone awry in her images of displaced furniture that echo uprooted characters: “sofas, armchairs, and tables of that other world, deprived of solid ground, fall chaotically . . . into oblivion”. (Falling furniture foreshadows to a falling woman our “heroine”, who plunges into the void and dies “instantly”.) “The tale,” the narrator adds, “is like a hotel; characters appear and disappear”. A few pages later, furniture is piled up in a soggy heap out in the corner of the garden, where it will wait, forgotten, until clement weather. Tulli reminds us of the spatial and temporal fragility that lurks behind superficial solidity, and furniture, an everyday component of our lives vividly underscores this vulnerability. Our universe, she stresses, is built on sand, whirling through the blackness of the void.
How better to increase our sense of fear and helplessness than with a senseless crime? As in Dostoevsky’s later works, violence emphasizes the tenuousness of life. However, while in Dostoevsky murder is linked with larger religious issues, no such central theme emerges in Tulli. Thus we read that workmen are shot dead with an automatic pistol, a weapon divorced from a human perpetrator. The narrator—whose discomfort and powerlessness increase exponentially throughout—is “forced” to tell us about this pointless, bloody crime. He doesn’t act of his own free will, but the reader never finds out who has compelled him to recount this exceptionally unpleasant episode. Nor do we know why he recounts any of the incidents that he attempts to describe. His efforts are made increasingly difficult by his unruly and independent characters. But the characters themselves do not gain in strength, and the centrifugal forces that the author set in motion from the beginning pull characters and events out into empty space. At the end, the story has “slipped out of [the narrator’s] hands”.
By describing the narrator from the outside, Tulli effectively takes over his role and transforms him into yet another character. Midway through the novel, he has lost the privileged position we traditionally associate with a narrator. He is a most unwilling narrator, one who is “determined to do his job at the lowest possible cost” and who “sighs and sets to”. He gets his feet wet when attempting to keep pace with the novel. Unlike Herling’s narrator, always in control, Tulli’s is helpless and reluctant. We see him “calmly open[ing] and clos[ing] a double door and put[ting] a bunch of keys on a round side table”. As Chekhov’s readers recall from his play The Three Sisters, possession of keys denotes control, but Tulli’s narrator surrenders control when he deposits them on the furniture. Like peripatetic characters in the hotel and displaced furniture that hovers in space or gets shoved into a corner, forfeited keys underscore transience, loss of control.
Tulli elegantly distills the unease of a universe that has spun out of balance. She enlists details from everyday life, details that resonate with her readers’ own unpleasant experiences. We see a married woman (encountered earlier, in a relationship with her lover) sitting uncomfortably in a dentist chair. Dental problems compound personal problems, and we never know whether anesthetic was administered. But we know “it’s going to hurt” if she wasn’t medicated. Tulli forces us to imagine an unpleasant scenario, including the whirring drill. She expands fictional anxiety to include her readers, in effect forcing us into this unsettling world.
Finally, the void prevails, and we are deposited in a silent world, the aural equivalent of visual emptiness. In her masterful novel, Tulli strikingly and subtly captures the essence of a world in transition between tradition and modernity. This elusiveness, an apt symbol of contemporary uncertainty, may also be an echo of Poland’s complex history." - Janet Tucker

"Moving Parts is an invigorating puzzle of grammar and narrative that takes the reader on a fantastic journey through the last hundred years of European history without ever leaving the confines of a hotel. This curious building contains an impossible number of floors, trapdoors, and tunnels that seem to be the architecture of the story itself as well as the whole world. We follow here a nameless narrator who “would prefer not to tell about anything at all,” and who is not the book’s narrator but has been paid to narrate a certain plot, a banal tale involving a love triangle and an argument in a garden. This narrator gets bored, sidetracked, and ultimately lost as he struggles to maintain his hold on a story in which characters mutate or complain about their story line, other narrators of other stories get in the way, and a trapdoor in the hotel’s basement leads to a tunnel, which leads to an apartment building during World War II, which leads to an elevator, which leads to something pretty close to hell on earth. Because he is not a reader or character, our narrator can move behind the scenes of the hotel—which stand in for the constructed realities of narrative and history—with a set of keys that open doors to other places and times; but he is finally as powerless as anyone to understand or affect the nightmare of the world he confronts. In its surprising movements through history, space, and language, Moving Parts is an incisive social commentary that suggests how crucial it is we pay attention to dominant structures of narrative in literature and life." - Danielle Dutton

"Like all great works of art, Tulli’s books create something new, something that doesn’t respond to what the reader has been conditioned to expect. To begin with, they don’t tell a story in a straightforward way; rather, they tell the story of creation itself, of what it means to create, and this is particularly true of Moving Parts, a novel reminiscent of Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author or of the French nouveau roman.
Moving Parts mixes reflections on creation with the narrative fabric itself, and this gives it a mythical dimension, though it is hard to summarize. The historical time moves back and forth between German-occupied Poland during World War II, the Cold War, the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and the present. The space also is disconcertingly unidentifiable—the setting is Poland, but the characters’ names are not necessarily Polish: there’s an African-American trumpeter named John Maybe; the tight-rope walker Mozhe and his partner Yvonne Touseulement (who is also John Maybe’s lover); a Captain in the third Reich, Feuchtmeier, and his wife; and a Jewish publisher called Fojchtmajer.
Each time the story approaches some kind of resolution, Tulli makes sure we don’t settle comfortably in it, letting us know that it could branch off in many directions. The numerous possible stories that could develop are compared to the floors of a hotel where an elevator might stop: the names of the characters appear in the computerized list of guests, and the moving parts of the elevator are compared to the mechanisms of grammar governing the story. The focus shifts constantly from a vertical dimension—the stories that develop out of the elevator’s movement—to a horizontal dimension—the stories developing in a train that moves from one station to another.
This multi-dimensional storyline is unified by the presence of the narrator, who becomes a character in his own tale. When Fojchtmajer is forced by the Nazis to leave his house, the narrator moves in—the narrator who, like all characters, has a body, a wallet, and biological needs. The story ends with his grotesque humiliation in front of a big audience: he flips over, loses his glasses, injures his nose, his pants fall down, his butt is kicked, and a crumpled ball of paper hurled from the crowd hits him. Thus Tulli’s carefully constructed world succumbs to the inescapable chaos that precedes and follows all creation." - Daniela Hurezanu

"Moving Parts is an incredible, truly insightful novel in which the narrator looses control of his story. What? Yes! He becomes a character and cannot get out of the view of the reader. This is not a book to breeze though, it is jam packed full of brilliant quotes and stunning writing. The concept of this novel, and the storyline are completely unlike anything that I have read before. The depth in language use and parts of speech was over my head many times, but a lover of grammar would fall in love with the way words such as "predicate" and "parts of speech" are woven into regular everyday language, which the author does with ease.
While reading the word choice and use of certain phrases I could not help but to feel that I was missing out, that it was incredibly vast and I was only drinking from the surface. If you are a person who loves to think, who loves incredible well-thought deep quotes and an intense knowledge of language captivates you, this is your book. Read it and you will love it. It will speak to you and drive you to a deeper understanding about the other books that you love to read. It will guide you through the feelings characters suffer in being written about, and those that narrators must endure in order to tell their story (even if they don't want to), it will help you know more about the concept of a novel, in which all is created...but by whom? Who is in charge of these books that we read, who leads the reader? How would it be if things were not the way they should be in a novel, if the characters did not follow what the narrator asked of them, if past and future were slowly blurred and confusion was the key theme of the story? Read Moving Parts by Magdalena Tulli and you will surely be submersed in this fictional chaos of writing and will be taken to a deeper understanding of our current idea: a fictional novel, in which nothing really exists, except in our minds, our desires and on the paper.

Quotes from Moving Parts:

"All he can do, and that only to a certain degree, is to govern grammatical forms, an essential element, especially as open space, of their own accord taking on the forms of the future tense, without any obligations."
"The parts, always the same ones, wait like traps into which new characters will continue to fall, irrespective of their own wishes, promises, and misgivings."
"They even tried to joke about this process, but their jokes were not entirely successful; they were not funny enough for them to convince themselves that they were sagely beyond the reach of grammar. And so in the end, exhausted by the anticipation of leaving and by visions of an uncertain future, they changed the subject, returning to a certain betrayal, because betrayal was at least something they were capable of understanding."
" Hardly anything is possible any longer. And no truth will appear until the secure forms of the past tense impose order." - bethany (dreadlock girl)

Magdalena Tulli, Flaw, Trans. by Bill Johnston (Archipelago Books, 2007)

"Another arcane exercise from the Polish author of Moving Parts (2005). A tailor plies his needle. A maid bustles around her employers' kitchen. A radical student wakes up with a hangover. A lawyer and a newsboy both find their fortunes ruined. And a far-off catastrophe sets off a wave of discord as refugees pore into the tiny square of an unnamed town. But we should not suppose that this is a real town square, one connected to the real world. No, the far-from-omniscient narrator informs us, this is nothing but a flimsy set, a shabby facade constructed by a shiftless, unreliable crew-workers who submit multiple invoices for the same job and sell stolen materials to other stories. This idea that the author is not a creator-god but a hapless architect relying on dishonest contractors is funny at first, and it seems like it might even be interesting. But the more Tulli belabors the conceit, the less amusing and interesting it becomes. It's hard not to wonder if this sort of novel-one that isn't so much a novel as it is a critical dissection of the novel-has not also reached a similar point of diminishing returns. Aficionados of European metafiction may find this book exciting-or they may not-but it's hard to imagine it finding a receptive audience outside that rarefied circle. Not for the average reader-or even, maybe, for the above-average reader." - Kirkus Reviews

"Recently, I was chatting with a friend over IM about the virtues of Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of the 19th-century novel The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. After listening to me gush about how the film's slow, deliberate pacing mimicked the languorous sentences of the Victorian novels from that era, my friend admitted that he probably wouldn't like the picture. He sheepishly confessed that the on-demand quick fixes that define a large portion of the entertainment of our era had warped his ability to appreciate fare that was less forthright in its approach. Not being wholly immune to this phenomenon, I hastened to express my sympathies to my friend regarding his predicament.
I have recounted this anecdote as means to introduce the work of the brilliant Polish novelist Magdalena Tulli - whose books might be herded into the category of novels of ideas - to ensure that I don't make the same mistake twice: i.e., damning with praise. Thus, let me say up front that Tulli's work, while brimming with serious reflections, is far from dry and almost always immediately rewarding from the outset.
To grasp the context from which Tulli's oeuvre emerges one should be mindful that throughout the last century, the constricting belts of occupation and repression that wrapped around the lives of countless Poles shaped a culture of opposition. In this climate, underground lectures and publications proliferated. Little marvel, then, that the international, multidisciplinary aesthetic movement that has come to be identified as "modernism" was ported to Poland. For just as modernist artists labored against inherited regimentation of expression, likewise did many citizens in their everyday lives. Perhaps this is why an ethical, not just an aesthetic, mandate seems to inform the compositional innovations that were practiced by some of the most dashing exemplars of 20th-century Polish literature.
One finds evidence of this tradition in the fictional creations of Tulli, who has published four novels, three of which have been translated into English. As might be presumed of a writer who is acquainted with the modernist toolset (she has translated Proust into Polish), much of Tulli's writing flaunts its artificiality. Time and again in Flaw, as in her previous novel, Moving Parts (2005), a high-toned mockery is made of any pretense toward explaining the reasons behind every event. Fortunately, these narrative feints aren't superfluous. They're used as a podium from which to disperse philosophical comments in clear, direct language.
Tulli uses a behind-the-scenes approach to begin Flaw. An unnamed narrator commissions a tailor and an assortment of tradesmen to construct costumes for the novel's characters and sets for their actions. From a cursory viewpoint, considering the extent to which movies, alone, have made plentiful use of this meta-narrative device (one thinks, for example, of the opening scene of Godard's Contempt or Truffaut's Day for Night), such staginess does appear retrograde. In practice, however, Tulli immediately overcomes the familiar nature of this plot mechanic by milking it for a thoughtful effect.
As in Moving Parts, the unnamed narrator of Flaw is depicted as a sympathetic bungler who is incapable of conducting the story in an orderly fashion. This image of a beleaguered impresario allows Tulli to pack a judicious amount of buoyancy into her tale of displaced morality. It also emphasizes the writer's marginal status as a responder to - as opposed to an instigator of - events. For instance, on account of the narrator's monetary doldrums, the tailor becomes disgruntled with his work:
The more perfect the item that sprang from his needle in the first burst of inspired diligence, before the cash was used up to pay the rent, the greater the subsequent shame when things begin to descend into the mass production of poorly made garments. But shame decays; nothing turns to dust faster. It is wiped off with a clothes brush. Discarding his ambitions, the tailor will from now on cut the cloth sparingly and unimaginatively… Jackets will restrict freedom of movement by creaking at the seams.
Tulli coasts from an ominous allegory about thwarted potential and diminished freedom, toward a reckoning of how something, i.e., "shame," operates. It's her facility with saying what something is, rather than how it feels, that identifies her as an intellectual artist.
This attention to space is a theme revisited throughout Tulli's books - her 2004 novel Dreams and Stones ranks among the most accomplished meditations on urban planning in fiction. In Moving Parts, the narrator tracks the characters through a vertiginously interlocking spatial tissue comprised of a hotel, subway station, bar, house, and circus. Tulli's liquefaction of boundaries allows her to dream up some genuinely trippy moments - during one part, the narrator, traveling into the bowels of the hotel, encounters a makeshift medical facility for war victims, which must be cleared away to make room for a "German gunboat [that] slowly drops onto the floor." This incorporation of the surreal frees the narrator to experience and comment ironically on everything from the Soviet invasion of Poland to the redenomination of Polish currency in the 1990s.
In Flaw, by contrast, spatial parameters are more fixed. Even so, Tulli unmoors her story from specifics. Action takes place either on or behind a set built to "look like some quiet neighborhood of a large city." Beneath this universal canopy, a notary awakes one morning. Before ducking into his office - which the narrator's contractors have neglected to erect - the notary drops by a cafe inhabited by a hungover student. At length, the notary receives a phone call from his broker, who informs him that a stock market crash is underway.
News of the disaster spreads quickly, goods are swept off the shelves of stores and a black market comes into being. (Adding to this all-encompassing instability is the fact that the "contractors" helped to engineer the crash.)
Refugees emerge, fresh from who-knows-where. "Up till now they had lived where they belonged, uninitiated into the mysteries of the freight railroad, uninformed about…the economies made in the construction of walls, far away from the notary and his safe." Deposited by streetcar into the center of the neighborhood, their presence provokes predictable fear in the local residents.
As if all this weren't enough, an announcement is made on the radio that the government has been ousted in a coup. This brightens the student's day noticeably. Eager to avail himself of the shifting social climate, he stuffs his pants into his boots and buckles his belt around the outside of his jacket. In congruence with the novel's leitmotif that clothes can shape one's circumstances, this stab at military dress up works well enough that soon the student enjoys newfound respect as the organizer of a militia, which keeps an increasingly tight rein over the refuges.
With so much compacted allegory - what with the shady covert machinations, preyed-upon refugees, and hint of a totalitarian dawn - it's impressive that Flaw doesn't flounder, as the story's narrator does, in its attempt to express the dark opportunism that soiled much of 20th-century European history. But excluding a couple of sections where Tulli indulges in a truism here ("The pity of the majority is reluctant to make sacrifices: custom dictates that its noble impulses are paid for by those it overlooks") or an overblown description there ("Not a hair on anyone's head had been harmed and no one had suffered any wrong, aside from a few bruises and a certain amount of spilled blood"), Flaw is agile at exploring the ever fertile soil from which dehumanization can spring." - Christopher Byrd