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the complete review - fiction

Nine

by
Andrzej Stasiuk

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : grim but evocative portrait of 1990s Warsaw

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Das Buch ist Teil einer Erkundung des Ostens. (...) Stasiuk bricht seinen Roman Neun einfach ab, als die Aussichten über Warschau richtig trübe geworden sind und sich keiner mehr etwas vormachen kann." - Eberhard Rathgeb, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "For all its street-smart pace and grit, Nine is studded with hauntingly graceful and tender passages (Bill Johnston's translation reads beautifully). (...) Impatient with join-the-dots exposition, Stasiuk can be elliptical to the point of opacity. He cuts from scene to scene, mind to mind. Keep up, and the rewards justify the effort. If Quentin Tarantino mutated into a Polish literary novelist, his work might resemble Nine." - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
  
  
• "A book like this makes most British and American writing seem so asinine." - Tom Tomaszewski, Independent on Sunday
  
  
• "Combined with a frustrating style, which contrives unwarranted mystery from personal pronouns, Nine's excess of misery rather blunts the edge to its attack on capitalism." - Anthony Cummins, New Statesman
  
  
• "In its very inexpressiveness, the narrative voice of Nine becomes an active element, oscillating across a range of overtones. (...) In some ways, Nine seems to draw on the tradition of fictional angst and revulsion, as if Nausea and The Stranger were crossed with the dyspeptic vision of Michel Houellebecq. But the combination of elements Stasiuk evokes, the small hopes and widespread corruption, the tawdriness and seductiveness of the material world, the hooligan toughness and melancholy cynicism, belongs unmistakably to post-Communist Eastern Europe." - Eva Hoffman, The New York Review of Books
  
  
• "I caught a flavor of Hamsun, Sartre, Genet and Kafka in Stasiuk’s scalpel-like but evocative writing. Nine feels like a major work of modern fiction, a portrait of an uprooted and restless generation of Eastern Europeans and of a city resigned to the fact that post-Communism is not quite as advertised. This book will undoubtedly win Andrzej Stasiuk a greater following in America and, with luck, will pave the way for the translation of more vibrant literature from Eastern Europe." - Irvine Welsh, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "The writingis intensely atmospheric. (...) Nine is a novel almost wholly given over to mood. (...) Nine is not always intelligible; it is sometimes frustratingly opaque, but it is brooding, beguiling, memorable. It is a serious novel about politics, society, doing what one must; it approaches the intellect via the senses." - Toby Lichtig, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "Das Leben kann jeden Augenblick beginnen und eine beliebige Richtung nehmen oder aufhören. Mit diesem Spatz in der Hand lässt es sich auf dem Dach der Welt zumindest vorübergehend aushalten. Freiheit ist im Scheitern und Ausweglosen möglich." - Eberhard Straub, Die Welt
  
  
• "Das alles sieht nur der Autor mit seinem himmelblauen Madonnenblick, und vielleicht sollten wir ergriffener sein, denn es ist sicher kein leichtes Stück Arbeit gewesen: den Geist der Unreife eines Witold Gombrowicz mit der dreckigen Unschuld eines Céline und einer Art Bitterfelder Weg zu diesem rußschwarzem ostalgischen Existenzialismus zusammenzuschmieden, der das Herz eines Betonkommunisten erwärmen müsste, wäre da nicht dieser paranoische Katholizismus. Wahrscheinlich handelt es sich um so etwas wie postmoderne Ironie. Aber eine Ironie, die man nicht versteht, ist wie ein Angeklagter, der die Aussage verweigert." - Gabriele Killert, Die Zeit

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Set in post-Communist Warsaw, Nine is a grim, dark tour of the Polish capital. It is a book where many of the characters are in almost constant motion, trying to get somewhere (and/or escape) -- and yet there's a pervasive feeling of aimlessness, of the impossibility of finding a hold (or a place), or of getting away from all this. On trams and busses, by car, on foot: much of Warsaw passes by. It's almost incidental, yet this backdrop can't help but bleed into the story itself.
       Stasiuk's descriptions seem mere colour, but they're evocative and set the scenes, at every point:

The brickwork had the color of congealed blood. Like a wound seeping through a bandage.

     "Beirut, Bolek; this place is Beirut."
     "We could take a piss on it, then torch it."
     "Come on. You'd torch your family home ?"

     "I was doing this and that, getting a loan, getting a ride; business was going to save the world. Then later, when things took off ... I needed money from one day to the next, and I'd make it back right away. But with the bank things always drag on ..."

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Links:

• Vintage publicity page
• Suhrkamp foreign rights page

• Curled up with a Good Book
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (German)
• The Independent
• Independent on Sunday
• Internetowe Imperium Książki (Polish)
• KGB Bar Lit Magazine
• literaturkritik.de (German)
• New Statesman
• Publishers Weekly
• Die Welt (German)
• Words without Borders
• Die Zeit (German)

• Official site
• Profile at Polish Culture

• Fado

• See Index of Eastern European literature

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About the Author:

       Polish author Andrzej Stasiuk was born in 1960.

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© 2007-2021 the complete review

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