Magiczna rana

A hapless young man struggles to figure out his place in a family that sees him only as the absence of a loved one long dead. A disappointed lover weighs the possibility of building a new life for herself in a celebrity-obsessed provincial town that is literally collapsing in illusion around her. Rather than its promised portal to a world of cosmopolitan creativity, an international artist’s residency brings only isolation and a live-action demonstration of a writer’s own irremediable foreignness. A food service job seems like a dead end, but not because the worker had studied sociology: that, at least, couldn’t be more useful for dealing with an endless stream of oblivious customers.

Drawing from the ever-deepening well of sharp wit, acute social observation, and linguistic virtuosity that she has continued to fill throughout an extraordinarily diverse career, with Wonder Wound Dorota Masłowska has forged a new Dubliners for the 21st century. Here we find as much high comedy and heartbreak, blistering satire and trenchant critique – sometimes by turns, usually all at once – as readers have come to expect from one of Poland’s – and world literature’s – most reliably innovative voices.

In these thematically intertwined, phantasmagoric short stories, Masłowska demonstrates time and again how dream and nightmare are merely two ways of looking at the same thing. And she achieves this once again in masterfully sculpted prose that is as propulsive as it is challenging, jumping mid-sentence from lyric metaphor to advertising jingle to political boilerplate. This is a book that demands to be read, heard and translated with a finely tuned ear.