Jezioro Dargin

Chmielewski is often called the bard of Warsaw, its inhabitants, its places, their minor affairs. He is a Varsovian, he feels comfortable in the city, whether downtown or on the outskirts, he’s walked across it every which way, he’s dropped into bars, listened to conversations – learned and incoherent, meaningful and meaningless, on the train platform, at the bus stop, in the toilet, in crowds of pedestrians, in corporations, at flea markets and in church. He doesn’t pick up on or describe great personages. His heroes are always people who don’t stand out from the crowd, who noiselessly disappear within it, who remain in the memory of their loved ones, though not always. They exist, but at the end of the day the world wouldn’t change without them. Maybe it would only be less bright? 

Chmielewski is a nostalgic writer; he’s also a writer of the departing world, even when the pages of his stories or novels focus on the here and now. In his prose, nothing happens quickly or abruptly, there are no plot twists that send the reader back to reread the previous page. 

Who is the narrator of Dargin Lake, Chmielewski’s new novel? A mature man, probably closer to 50 than 40. A peculiar man, because that’s what you’d call someone who’s never had a girlfriend, lives in the world of music, who spent years as a host on public radio, and passes the rest of his time reading – mainly in German, on account of his education – and in the company of a friend and his group, whom he met on vacation however many years ago. He’s a man at a crossroads, who’s lost his job and the friend who helped him breathe more deeply, see things more broadly and enter a world at first foreign, but with each month, with each visit to the tavern and each beer drunk, closer and more his own. 

This is also a book about changing mores in contemporary Poland. Vodka, beer, unhurried storytelling about what used to be, about where and with whom. Or about why things were just as they were and couldn’t be otherwise. Chmielewski’s characters have no hierarchies or duties among themselves, no obligations to do anything. The journey to Masuria (the region of the Polish Great Lakes) is just a pretence – with its post-German strand, the trip is a small piece of the story of Warsaw. Tearing oneself away from reality, the city, a small interlude in a life once planned out and now taking its own path.