Koniec

The main protagonist of Marta Hermanowicz’s debut novel is the thirty-six-year-old Malwina. Some time ago she left her family home located in a small town and now – the year is 2018 – she returns there upon hearing that her grandma is dying. Coming back home is the trigger for a stream of bad memories about her lonely, unhappy childhood. Malwina insists that from a very early age she dreamt the dreams of her grandmother, who had gone through really hard times during World War II. First, together with her family, she was displaced by the Soviets and sent to Siberia, where she went through the hell of a labour camp and survived by a sheer miracle. Not all of her relatives were as lucky as she was, some of them died. The trauma was never expressed – neither by Malwina’s grandmother, nor by her mother. The protagonist reconstructs those memories on her own, introducing herself as a dream catcher. Her motivation is two-fold. First, Malwina makes a claim for memory, wants to pay her respects to the suffering of her ancestors. Second and more importantly, she points to the source of the misery that she herself has suffered in her childhood and younger years. Not much changed when she became a grown-up woman: we meet Malwina as a person in a serious crisis, 

fearful, neurotic, seeing the world only in dark colours. Throughout the novel, the line “It’s all grandma’s fault” returns like a chorus. 

The psychological truth of The End might be questionable, but it would be difficult to deny the novel its artistic truth. The book has been very skilfully written, it ably presents the intertwined time planes (the past and present), various versions of the Polish language are mixed together.