Idzie tu wielki chłopak

What is the literary potential of the world’s smallest pony, a man disguised as a squirrel, or a neighbour wearing an astronaut costume? One possibility is to assemble a showcase of peculiarities – to make the ordinary strange by inventing extraordinary characters. But there is another way. One could, on the flipside, make the peculiarities ordinary and set them as the background for perfectly normal, featureless protagonists. This is Grzegorz Bogdał’s approach in his second short story collection (after Floryda [Florida]) in which he normalises the protagonists not only through their psychological and social traits, but also, most importantly, through the collection’s original structure. 

Bogdał’s characters are thirty-something-year-old men entangled in family relationships as well as the social dynamics of the workplace. They make certain efforts in these relationships (such as Gabriel, who, ahead of a break-up, wants to gift his partner’s daughter with the world’s smallest pony), but more often than not, they simply give in to their circumstances and the actions of the more charismatic characters. Bogdał sets these men against the backdrop of peripheral landscapes – on woodland hikes, in claustrophobic apartments, on abandoned building sites. 

The collection’s structure remains the most interesting, however – a meaningful dimension to Bogdał’s writing. It splits the titular story into parts with the other narratives placed in between. As we pass from one story to the next, the protagonists’ uniqueness is dispelled, and they become similar in their everyday, completely unspectacular failures – similar, too, to the figures found in prose adjacent to Bogdał’s, such as that by Denis Johnson, Lucia Berlin or George Saunders.