Can you really know another person, even one of your own kin? When they pass away, can you summarise them in words, in an odd memory, a sometime lover’s confession, a casual remark? The pattern of remembering and the texture of everyday events reveal the fabric of human nature: passionate, paradoxical, never wholly penetrable.
In a few masterful strokes Łoziński portraits uncannily authentic characters. He also shows how, in retrospect, the pivotal moments in our lives seem contained in long silences, accidental gestures, irrelevant words. The tautly structured novel keeps Daniel’s secret to the last page.
Reisefieber is a novel that Polish literature has been looking forward to for years.

Mikołaj Łoziński, 26 years old, is a writer and photographer, a graduate in sociology from Sorbonne (Paris 5). He has published short stories in literary magazines and held a number of photographic exhibitions. He has earned his living by doing odd jobs, among others he worked as a painter and assistant-cum-interpreter to a blind psychotherapist. Reisefieber, which was three years in the making, in both France and Poland, was his first novel.