Zsunęła się z krzesła. Ciennik

Shadowbook is a subtle, sophisticated and very tender story about everything that is close and far away at the same time; about the past, life and dreams, about love and loss, about memory and forgetting, and therefore about what is universal and always trendy. But for this kind of work to become wonderful literature, a substantial talent is necessary. And the author is not short of it! Following the example of The Decameron, Bielecki spins his narrative in ten novellas (or perhaps poetic prose), which delight with the art of literary imagination. As is the nature of the luminous phenomenon captured in the title – shadow – particular parts or chapters get longer or shorter, which means that reading this book, modest in size, turns into something marked with an incredible dynamism. But it is not just the structure that intrigues. Bielecki’s latest book stems from being mindful and sensitive to language and its potential to create and recreate the world, whether imagined or remembered. Insightful observations of seemingly unimportant details often become a chance for presenting the dual nature of words. On the one hand, a word has the power to bring (a dead mother) back to life, to create a half-fantastical, half-realistic world, imagined realms or those from the dreamt-up past, straight from science fiction. On the other hand, the words uttered again and again in varying contexts are responsible for an ever-resurgent nostalgia for a world receding into the past. This duality is conveyed in a thought-through metaphor of shadow, with its obverse and reverse, with its constant oscillation between light and darkness. Then there is also an exceptional ear for language, the skill of handling sophisticated rhetorical figures, such as irony or self-irony, short phrases evoking a softened voice right next to complex statements, mythicisation and demythicisation, humour and loftiness, attention to details and micro-specks of events from the past reflected in the everyday – all of these things mean that Bielecki’s work can be easily situated next to the classics of high modernism.