A tenderly wry collection of mini epiphanies chronicling the liminal space of ‘middle age’
A Good Daughter
In middle old age, various exercises in hermeneutics await us.
Your ageing parent starts to lose their memory, repeats themself, loses the thread and simultaneously picks up another, and the whole time you’re searching for extra meaning in this jumble of sentences. If you’re used to your parent being relatively sharp, or you’re a considerate person, you don’t label this behaviour as ‘getting muddled’ or ‘the onset of Alzheimer’s’; you just listen, as if it were an intoxicated priest making a speech. What is the recurring theme in father’s monologues? What’s the main subject? Doom and gloom? Politics?
My father loves the ‘everyone’s got problems’ topic, which is intended to distract from his own problems with the gas stove and to delay definitive decisions, such as ‘You shouldn’t be driving, I have to take your car away’.
There are some resolute women who know what to do when faced with these kinds of changes. And there are those who still always search for sense in the utterances of an old man or a teenage girl. They marvel at the most convoluted translations as strange creations of the mind. That’s the approach I take towards eccentricities. I treat rationalisations as intricate works of art, and repetitions as ornaments. I am inclined to extend the range of what makes sense because I haven’t defined any norms. Deep down, I feel that no such norm exists; rationalism is gradable and you can find sense in anything, even in the wildest theory, if only for momentary pleasure, or on a trial basis.
My practical decision-making ability loses out.
I can’t take my father’s car.
Minimalism
Older people sometimes serve as a caution, which is why we need them so badly. In the fates of our older female friends, we can find a caricature of the fate we want to elude, the fate for which we are predestined depending on whether we have a family or live alone. Both options feature their own patterns of unhappiness.
Young, single women usually have a negative model – ‘the old madwoman’ – and their goal is to avoid ending up like her. Or the aunt, energetic and positive, whose voice nonetheless contains a note of resentment that we’d never want to hear in our own. ‘Don’t be like her’, ‘Don’t be like him!’ – that’s a clear goal.
Family destiny has many facades, which is why it’s hard to learn anything from it – too many secrets. Observation won’t reveal the desperate attempts families make to survive for fear of ending up alone. Couples therapy, wedding vow renewals, tantric sex workshops – people do many things to salvage their family destiny. They do a lot to conceal the seams too. A bad family is less often a caution for another family than the fate of being alone.
Still, it is good to remember that we can all become a caution for others.
It’s quite a conceivable life goal: don’t become a caution. You don’t need to be an example, or a source of mimetic desire; it is enough not to be a caution.
‘Don’t become a caution’ as a minimum goal, analogous to the concept of a minimum level of happiness.
Translated by Kate Webster
A tenderly wry collection of mini epiphanies chronicling the liminal space of ‘middle age’
Translation rights: Michalina Dzierżęga, wydawnictwo@dowody.com
Little Empiria by Katarzyna Sobczuk is a lyrical and quietly powerful collection of micro-essays that meditate on the emotional terrain of early old age and the subtleties of middle life. Rather than offering a traditional narrative, Sobczuk presents a fragmented mosaic of intimate observations drawn from daily routines and fleeting moments: sending a birthday message to a distant relative, feeding birds from the kitchen window, or pausing over a sprouting weed between paving stones. These small acts become vehicles for larger reflections on time, memory, and the evolving sense of self that comes with ageing.
The book’s language is minimalist and elegant, avoiding ornamentation while inviting readers into a space of quiet recognition. Sobczuk’s tone is both warm and melancholic, marked by philosophical curiosity and flashes of dry humour. Without becoming overly abstract or analytical, her prose captures the emotional nuances of being a parent and a child at the same time, of witnessing change in one’s body and relationships, and of living in a world that continues, insistently, even as parts of one’s life begin to slow or recede.
Little Empiria will appeal to readers drawn to literary non-fiction and autofiction, particularly those interested in the intimate textures of domestic life, the psychology of ageing, and the richness of ordinary experience. Amid a revival of literary non-fiction, this collection stands out for its brevity, philosophical depth and stylistic poise.
Kate Webster
Selected samples
She climbed her first peaks in a headscarf at a time when women in the mountains were treated by climbers as an additional backpack. It was with her that female alpinism began! She gained recognition in a spectacular way. The path was considered a crossing for madmen. Especially since the tragic accident in 1929, preserved … Continue reading “Halina”
First, Marysia, a student of an exclusive private school in Warsaw’s Mokotów district, dies under the wheels of a train. Her teacher, Elżbieta, tries to find out what really happened. She starts a private investigation only soon to perish herself. But her body disappears, and the only people who have seen anything are Gniewomir, a … Continue reading “Wound”
A young girl, Regina Wieczorek, was found dead on the beach. She was nineteen years old and had no enemies. Fortunately, the culprit was quickly found. At least, that’s what the militia think. Meanwhile, one day in November, Jan Kowalski appears at the police station. He claims to have killed not only Regina but also … Continue reading “Penance”
The year is 1922. A dangerous time of breakthrough. In the Eastern Borderlands of the Republic of Poland, Bolshevik gangs sow terror, leaving behind the corpses of men and disgraced women. A ruthless secret intelligence race takes place between the Lviv-Warsaw-Free City of Gdańsk line. Lviv investigator Edward Popielski, called Łysy (“Hairless”), receives an offer … Continue reading “A Girl with Four Fingers”
This question is closely related to the next one, namely: if any goal exists, does life lead us to that goal in an orderly manner? In other words, is everything that happens to us just a set of chaotic events that, combined together, do not form a whole? To understand how the concept of providence … Continue reading “Order and Love”
The work of Józef Łobodowski (1909-1988) – a remarkable poet, prose writer, and translator, who spent most of his life in exile – is slowly being revived in Poland. Łobodowski’s brilliant three- volume novel, composed on an epic scale, concerns the fate of families and orphans unmoored by the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war and … Continue reading “Ukrainian Trilogy: Thickets, The Settlement, The Way Back”
