Anéantir – to reduce to nothing or plunge into a state of utter despair. It was not without reason that Michel Houellebecq chose this infinitive for the French title of his eighth novel; to revisit the fundamental law of nature – the progressive and inevitable degradation of the body that turns every living being to dust; to draw attention to the greatest taboo of the West - death - and thus plunge its readers into despair. We are indeed devastated by the omnipresence of themes related to the...
Deeply rooted in the South African reality of the past three decades, the last year’s Booker Prize winner, The Promise by Damon Galgut, is a story about an agricultural family, the Swarts, whose destiny unfolds to the rhythm of four consecutive funerals, political changes and a constantly returning question of an unkept promise once made by seriously ill Manie to her black servant Salome. At death’s door, she wishes for the decrepit tiny cottage situated on the other side of the rural propert...
This article about the work of the 2018 Nobel laureate may baffle you. Firstly, I will not comply with the golden rule unofficially imposed on every Pole who dares to write about their national literature in a foreign language: "you will write flatteringly about it or not write about it at all". Furthermore, my text, being not very laudatory, will certainly recall the opinion of the ruling party’s supporters as unable to accept Olga Tokarczuk’s vision, as being too progressive and not suffici...
