Paweł Huelle
The Other Stories
Inne historie
PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED IN:
Germany
Italy
France
US
UK
About the author:
Also by this author:
The Last Supper
Who Was David Weiser?
Castorp
Mercedes-Benz
Stories for a Time of Relocation
Cold Sea Tales
The Other Stories
Inne historie
PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED IN:
Germany
Italy
France
US
UK
The stories gathered in this collection could well make a novel each. The yarn-spinning seems endless, another story always pops up and begs to be told. Anything can get it going, really: an old photograph, a laconic note in a chronicle, a map or even, as in the story of Magdalena, “a carefully handwritten inventory of household goods.” Huelle effortlessly transforms himself into a storytelling medium for whom these traces of the past are enough to go back, uncover the bygone events, unravel the knotted threads of human lives, the farces and the dramas, rekindle the smothered feelings. How much is true and how much is made up – only the storyteller knows. Is Mr Hakagawa as real as Cavafy eagerly waiting for his lover in a café? Did the mysterious vicar P. in fact exchange letters with Thomas Mann? Who is the actual author of the forgotten novel Der Scherz?
Huelle seems to have a soft spot for telling tall tales and doesn’t check himself even while recounting what he himself saw and experienced in Prague, Petersburg or Dublin. Granted, yarn-spinning may be burdensome in life, but in literature it is definitely a virtue.
About the author:
Paweł Huelle is a novelist and poet. He was born in Gdańsk in 1957 and graduated in Polish Philology at the University of Gdańsk. He worked as a university lecturer, journalist and director of the Gdańsk Polish Television Centre. Honoured with many prestigious literary awards, Huelle is one of the most successful contemporary Polish writers.
His first novel Who Was David Weiser (1987) was hailed by the critics as “the book of the decade,” “a masterpiece” and “a literary triumph” and has been published, among others, in Germany, Spain, France and Finland. It is a story of a mysterious disappearance of a Jewish boy during his summer vacations. Many years later Dawidek’s friend sets out to investigate the events that came to shape his entire life. The novel has been described as a coming-of-age story, an adventure novel or even as a philosophical treatise.
Like Who Was David Weiser, Huelle’s next two books Stories for a Time of Relocation (1991) and First Love and Other Stories (1996) are set in his home town of Gdańsk and its environs, even though they are concerned with different historical periods and social milieus.
His first novel Who Was David Weiser (1987) was hailed by the critics as “the book of the decade,” “a masterpiece” and “a literary triumph” and has been published, among others, in Germany, Spain, France and Finland. It is a story of a mysterious disappearance of a Jewish boy during his summer vacations. Many years later Dawidek’s friend sets out to investigate the events that came to shape his entire life. The novel has been described as a coming-of-age story, an adventure novel or even as a philosophical treatise.
Like Who Was David Weiser, Huelle’s next two books Stories for a Time of Relocation (1991) and First Love and Other Stories (1996) are set in his home town of Gdańsk and its environs, even though they are concerned with different historical periods and social milieus.
Also by this author:
The Last Supper
Who Was David Weiser?
Castorp
Mercedes-Benz
Stories for a Time of Relocation
Cold Sea Tales
Copyright © by Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak 2007, wykonanie serwisu Indecity