PrintA Thousand Peaceful Cities by Jerzy Pilch
A comic gem, Jerzy Pilch's A Thousand Peaceful Cities takes place in 1963 in the latter days of the Polish post-Stalinist 'thaw'. The narrator, Jerzyk ('little Jerzy' in Polish) is a teenager who is keenly interested in his father, a retired postal administrator, and his father's closest friend, Mr. Trąba, a failed Lutheran clergyman, alcoholic, would-be Polish insurrectionist, and one of the wildest literary characters since Laurence Sterne's Uncle Toby. One drunken afternoon, Mr. Trąba and the narrator's father decide to take charge of their lives and do one final good turn for humanity: travel to distant Warsaw and assassinate the de facto Polish head of state, First Secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party, Władysław Gomułka - assassinating Mao Tse-tung, after all, would be impractical. And they decide to involve Jerzyk in their scheme...
Jerzy Pilch is one of Poland's most important contemporary writers and journalists - Czeslaw Milosz once called him 'the hope of young Polish prose'. In addition to his long-running satirical newspaper column, Pilch has published several novels, and he has been nominated for Poland's prestigious NIKE Literary Award four times; he won the award in 2001 for The Mighty Angel.
David Frick is a Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley.
Reviews
A highly original voice.
Washington Times
Pilch's prose is masterful, and the bulk of 'The Mighty Angel' evokes the same numb, floating sensation as a bottle of Żołądkowa Gorzka'
Becky Ferreira, L Magazine
A Thousand Peaceful Cities
by Jerzy Pilch
Translated by David Frick
Publisher: Open Letter
Pub date: July 2010