Salki - Wojciech Nowicki

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the complete review - travel / personal history

Salki

by
Wojciech Nowicki

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

Title:	Salki
Author:	Wojciech Nowicki
Genre:	Non-fiction
Written:	2013 (Eng. 2017)
Length:	228 pages
Original in:	Polish
Availability:	Salki - US
	Salki - UK
	Salki - Canada

Polish title: Salki
Translated by Jan Pytalski

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Our Assessment:

B : fine variation on the personal travelogue, especially in its depiction of a musty eastern Europe

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Polityka	.	7/5/2013	Olga Byrska
Wyborcza	.	23/4/2013	Tomasz Fiałkowski

From the Reviews:

"Te oderwane, jak mogłoby się wydawać, od części wspomnieniowo-rozliczającej partie Salek ściśle przynależą do narracji: w niej wszystko dzieje się naraz, nie istnieją przyszłość i przeszłość, a jedynie ciągi pojęciowe, skojarzeniowe, które wzajemnie się uzupełniają. W tym sensie książka Nowickiego przypomina Pierścienie Saturna Sebalda, nie ustępując dziełu niemieckiego pisarza pod względem stylu oraz konstrukcji." - Olga Byrska, Polityka

"Salki to późny, ale świetny debiut prozatorski. (...) Salki zachwycają frazą i swobodą językową. Wpisany jest w nie zresztą jako jeden z wielu misternie przeplatających się i nawracających wątków traktat o języku." - Tomasz Fiałkowski, Wyborcza

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:

       Salki is a sort of travelogue, though author Wojciech Nowicki's spin on the genre is very much his own. Nominally, it is narrated by a reisefieberish Nowicki, stuck in his too-short bed -- "why did they make it so small, what kind of punishment is this ?" he complains -- on the morning of his departure from a writers residency in Swedish Gotland (the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators). But the short (sub-)chapters range far and wide -- usually physically ranging (he's travelling), but in all sorts of varieties of circumstances. From memories of childhood trips to, fairly late, a more detailed description of his stay at BCWT in Gotland, Nowicki gets around a great deal -- including, often, tangling with (largely family) history.
       Nowicki does occasionally move beyond Central and Eastern Europe -- there are mentions of visits to India and Paris, for example -- but it's the (eastern) European heartland that is his favored haunting ground -- in no small part, no doubt, because it is so haunted, by history and memory. Beginning with his birthplace, Opole, he repeatedly points to places that have had their identities changed by historic circumstances. There's the oppression and brutality of changing regimes, truly subjugating local populations. And while geography is immovable, borders aren't; so, for example, his hometown used to be -- until the end of the Second World War --, a German city, Oppeln, and before that it had been Bohemian, and Polish, too (and even as a German city had a sizable Polish minority population). Similarly, he's drawn to Ukraine, with its changing borders and Habsburg, Nazi, and Soviet pasts, all leaving their (often dark) impressions.
       History has also been smashed to smithereens in many of these places:

And in the city I come from there's almost no history left, just a few sandstone tombs and one tower. The rest was either destroyed, flooded, or the wood rotted and didn't last

As a result, too, much that is (again) visible is not actually authentic. He points out that: "'Rebuilding' is a key word in my part of the world" -- but often it's a pale imitation, or doesn't ring true.
Modernity has bypassed most of these distant parts of the European outback, which remain mired in complex (and often horrible) history and the past. Even relatively cosmopolitan Lviv -- now Ukrainian, but formerly Polish, and then Austrian -- is a shadow of its Lemberg-incarnation, and its present condition is manifest regardless of where one looks. So also among the most memorable scenes in Salki is Nowicki's description of a Georges de La Tour painting in the Lviv National Art Gallery:

I found La Tour's painting by accident; it wasn't as much a painting as it was a black, cracked, and convex rectangle barely recognizable at that point. I couldn't leave. La Tour's nocturne was covered with an extra layer of patina. [...] The La Tour in the Lviv National Gallery perfectly resembles the history of the city that stores it.

       Nowicki travels to some tourist spots -- such as Lviv -- but for the most part it's more like he's wandering in the outback, the old country -- in Poland, Ukraine, Romania, and elsewhere -- that no one would ever see as a destination. There's little there there, but Nowicki meets and is put up by locals, a stranger passing through, or crosses paths with the migrant streams of workers traveling to and from jobs in (western) Europe.
       Scenes and locales jump back and forth -- as if Nowicki was unable to stay in place for too long at any one time -- and include some painful family history, often tied to locales and the battles over them. The languages of the places are significant too: German or Ukrainian spoken in the places that are now nominally Polish; a great-grandfather who escaped to London, whose letter and few holiday cards, in a Polish the writer had little command over, Nowicki reproduces. And Nowicki himself clings to an outside language -- French, which is hardly useful in most of the places he visits -- with Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual the: "one novel that has accompanied me throughout the years on almost every extended trip".
       Nowicki explains the title (left in the original for the English-language edition):

Salki are the rooms in an attic

       Indeed, one can almost hear the creaking floorboards, and there's certainly enough terrible cold and stifling heat: Nowicki's central and eastern European attic extends very far, and it's a glimpse of a part of the European house that isn't often seen or talked about, the furthest of the hinterlands.
       Salki is a traveler's book -- one man's journey in his own (and his family's) past, along with that of a part of Europe that not only hasn't caught up with the EU-polished rest, but seems to have fallen back into a rut of history.
       Nowicki's summa is a familiar traveler-conclusion

I was expecting some conclusions, results, some knowledge, anything, but certainly not for the travels themselves to be the outcome.

So too his book isn't one of easy conclusions or sweeping statements of the state-of-this-world. It's a book of travels, of various sorts, the jumble of a journey -- the reading -- is the outcome -- and no less rewarding for that.

- M.A.Orthofer, 13 June 2017

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Links:

Salki:

Open Letter publicity page
Wydawnictwo Czarne publicity page
Excerpt

Reviews:

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Travel-related books
See Index of Literary Essays
Other books from Open Letter under review

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About the Author:

Polish writer Wojciech Nowicki was born in 1968.

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