Sierpień

The narrator of Paweł Sołtys’s autobiographical novella spends a hot August in Warsaw, sitting in cafés, walking, taking trams and buses, reading, writing by hand in his notebook (‘an anachronistic whim’) and exploring places off the beaten track – as well as those that no longer exist or have never existed. Past, present and fiction blend together in this engrossing, hypnotic narrative that one critic has called ‘an act of defiance against existential despair’.

A compassionate flâneur, the narrator observes Warsaw’s ordinary yet colourful inhabitants but also searches for ways to access the past. He visits forgotten memorials, wanders outside a former prison, peeks into churches and walks down streets that are no longer there.

Erudite and eclectic in his interests, he reads books bought in second-hand bookshops, which often trigger unexpected trains of thought or memories – including that of his 1998 trip to Ukraine and images from his childhood, such as the texture of his grandmother’s hands or his mother playing the piano. In both subject matter and approach, August recalls the work of WG Sebald, except that Sołtys is not making a journey but walking down streets he knows like the back of his hand, peeling back the layers of history of which few are aware.

Suffused with melancholy and the awareness that one cannot escape the present,

August is written in Sołtys’s highly concentrated style. Thoughtful and haunting, this short but substantial book will appeal to readers of reflective, poetic literary fiction.