PrintThe Mighty Angel by Jerzy Pilch
The Mighty Angel concerns the alcoholic misadventures of a writer named Jerzy. Eighteen times he wakes up in rehab. Eighteen times he is released - a sober and, more or less, healthy man - after treatment at the hands of the stern therapist, Moses Alias I Alcohol. And eighteen times he stops off at the liquor store on the way home, to pick up the supplies that are necessary to help him face his return to a ruined apartment.
While in rehab, Jerzy collects the stories of his fellow alcoholics - Don Juan the Rib, The Most Wanted Terrorist in the World, the Sugar King, the Queen of Kent, the Hero of Socialist Labour - in an effort to tell the universal and particular, story of the alcoholic, and to discover the motivations and drives that underlie the alcoholic's behaviour.
A simultaneously tragic, comic, and touching novel, The Mighty Angel displays Pilch's caustic humour, ferocious intelligence, and unparalleled mastery of storytelling.
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.
Bill Johnston is Director of the Polish Studies Center at Indiana University. In addition to Jerzy Pilch, he has translated the work of Witold Gombrowicz, Magdalena Tulli, and Stefan Żeromski, among others. In 1999 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship for Translation. In 2005 he was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and in 2008 he won the inaugural Found in Translation Award - presented annually to the translator of the finest Polish-English literary translation of the year - for Tadeusz Różewicz's New Poems.
Reviews
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
In this book, Pilch prattles on and on remorselessly in his masterly way, bends the reader's ear, fills the mind, grips the attention - and before you know where you are, you've reached the end of the book.
Lech Mergler
The Mighty Angel
by Jerzy Pilch
Translated by Bill Johnston
Publisher: Open Letter
Pub date: April 2009