Sylwia z Gibalaka i inne opowiadania

In his short story collection Sylwia of Gibalak, Wojciech Chmielewski presents his readers with a string of micro-stories in which what is small grows to take on universal symbolism. In the foreground we see details: pre-war Warsaw cobblestones, stunted trees in a courtyard in front of an apartment tower, and above it all, small, ostensibly ordinary characters with the extraordinary features of childlike eccentrics and street corner drunks. This local colour operates here as a palimpsest, for the narrator keeps seeing real Warsaw and ghost Warsaw, a city of the spectres of those murdered by the German occupiers and also a city of glass office towers: a city of contrasts. Chmielewski approaches these contrasts with great empathy, as he takes his narrator on a meandering journey through a crowd of the faithful at a Corpus Christi procession in the Iron Gate housing project, amid communist residential towers and the last pre-war apartment houses. Yet the voice of Chmielewski’s Warsaw is above all one of overheard stories, which he collects in the spirit of another chronicler of the capital – Marek Nowakowski. But this time, the starting point for his tales is always direct experience. In the story “Blood”, bullet holes in one wall of the Hala Mirowska covered market form the catalyst for the plot. Afterimages of tragic history – of blood flowing down the gutters during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 – combine with the rather grotesque image of a young Egyptian man’s finger bleeding as he prepares a kebab for the narrator. It’s a dish incidentally seasoned with blood, with an overheard conversation about chemotherapy in the background. Chmielewski has a fantastic feel for observation and finds grand metaphors in the living fabric of the city itself. He also includes a great deal of the magic of childhood and memories of once-noisy courtyards, and plenty of strong images set out in a simple, almost journalistic style. Chmielewski proves once again that new fiction about Poland’s big cities is in excellent shape.