Wojciech Nowicki's Salki is an excellent, absorbing read, one that will bring an intellectually challenging pleasure to the general reader and a wealth of anthropological material to the Slavic specialist in a wide range of subfields, from Polish-Ukrainian relations and the culture of late Socialism to the study of borderlands, trauma, post-memory, and ethnic violence. I am offering this blunt, conclusive statement as my lead simply because it is too easy to dismiss titles that one assumes fall outside of a predefined area of interest, especially when the book's review is nestled among dozens of others in the back of an academic journal, and most especially when that same title is a single word that is unfamiliar in this usage to many native speakers of the book's original language. Salki, as Nowicki eventually explains, “are the rooms in an attic; they also use nyże, for places where you can store your memories and memorabilia right above your head. Just like those stories here, the salki of my memory, which I open for everyone” (33). The book is a self-consciously expansive reflection on what the twentieth century means to the twenty-first, what the insistently local can offer a global and globalizing audience, and what the present owes to the non-present, whether one is looking forward or looking back. There is plenty here for all of us.
That wealth, however, must be mined. Nowicki's method is highly, at times dizzyingly associative. Minor visual details launch the author into discursive mnemonic flights that threaten to leave the reader behind, and by the time we have caught up Nowicki may well be somewhere else. His paragraphs have the flavor of a fever dream. He prepares us for this with an opening gambit that has the author sick in bed during a trip to the Swedish island-province of Gotland, meditating on the simultaneous compulsion to travel and the turbulence, both experiential and spiritual, that travel always brings. Such rhetorical framing, with its knowing, winking blend of autobiography and fiction and eagerness to establish an occasion for the flights that follow, has been with us at least since Rousseau rowed his dinghy onto Lake Bienne, but in recent years it has become a stock feature of Polish “reportage,” as if the mind's solitary walker had to justify the aimlessness of its reveries. Periodically throughout the book Nowicki touches base with his sickbed and the storm raging outside, though he keeps the ritual mercifully brief, since the real draw here is the restlessness of the author's own peripatetic memory, his rapid movement through tales of personal and collective displacement. We get snapshots of eastern Galicia before, during, and after the Second World War, when Nowicki's family were forced to abandon their native Tarnopil, as well as glimpses of medieval Gdańsk, seventeenth-century Paris, and the Opole Zoo during the flooding that hit central Europe in 1997, with further side-trips to Vilnius, Bukovina, and elsewhere. Sometimes we linger in one place for pages, though just as often syllables would be a more practical measure.
This is why the comparison to Ryszard Kapuściński, pushed by the book's press materials and obediently recycled in the reviews that have already appeared, is so misguided. Kapuściński, the architect of modern Polish reportage, blended fiction and nonfiction to create incisive portraits of places, slowly distilling the essential from the incidental over the span of a book. Nowicki seems suspicious of that very enterprise: since memory rarely, if ever, holds its focus for long before being derailed into new thoughts, the very act of producing a comprehensive portrait becomes deception. Nowicki-the-writer is a skeptical, if not altogether cynical, reader of images and narratives, as one of his most impressive earlier works, Dno oka: Eseje o fotografii (The Bottom of the Eye: Essays on Photography, 2010) already attests. He is much more interested in what we think we know about a text than in what the text pretends to know about itself. No wonder his prose growls and sneers as the narrator concludes a heartrending retelling of a family massacre or a wistful tableau by turning away bored, confused, or simply too irritated to have wasted another moment of the present on the past.
The translator, Jan Pytalski, is to be credited for rendering the tone of Nowicki's prose colorfully, though the reader should be forewarned that it takes a little time to settle into the translation, which has emerged from the kitchen slightly underdone. On every page, there are at least a couple instances of unidiomatic phrasing, behind which a speaker of Polish easily recognizes the original phrasing calqued into English. The effect is not precisely wooden: when combined with the occasional ill-chosen verb or quizzical noun, it simply lends the prose an accent that, albeit not characteristic of the original text, makes us feel that we are having an intimate conversation with a perceptive, eccentric, cantankerous foreign guest. Which is precisely how the author of Salki presents himself.
