Doctor Bianco and Other Stories
A postman who develops close friendships with everyone on his postal route, an old man who stops buying the coal he needs to heat his flat so he can afford Christmas presents for his granddaughters, a senile old Holocaust survivor who’s suspicious of almost all her neighbours, two young sisters who are fed up with their baby brother, and an old woman squabbling with her tailor while a suit is being sewn for her to wear at her own funeral – these are just some of the intriguing characters we meet in Doctor Bianco and Other Stories. Written in terse, spare, unaffected prose devoid of sentimentality, the nineteen stories in this collection gradually reveal the portraits of various people inhabiting one particular apartment building in an unspecified town. The gritty, harsh realities faced by Bielawski’s protagonists are at times darkly funny and other times gut-wrenchingly sad. Bielawski sets up a magnifying glass on a small corner of Polish life and allows us to glimpse fascinating, surreal scenes from a tangle of human lives whose heartbreak, despair and various anxieties might feel surprisingly familiar to readers from any walk of life.
Brilliant, insightful snapshots of everyday reality.
Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature
Bielawski’s characters circulate in a greyish humdrum world, but their hopes and concerns bleed out of the page and become ours in these strange and endearing fictions.
Jonathan Gibbs, author of The Large Door
Maciek Bielawski uses simple language to describe simple human feelings. His sentences are uncomplicated and devoid of superfluous description. Although the emotions in Bielawski’s stories are described with subtlety, there is a great intensity to them – as there should be in all good short stories.
Mateusz Matyszkowicz, Polish National Radio
Maciek Bielawski already convinced readers that he can write wise, unsentimental prose about the harshness of life in Twarde parapety, a novel about growing up in Poland in the 1970s and 80s. In his new collection of short stories, Bielawski once again proves that what he writes – natural, unaffected, devoid of fireworks, though sometimes slightly surreal – is interesting, thought-provoking literature. His stories are often painful, but they come from the everyday reality that oppresses us – from emotions expressed too rarely, from numerous failures and disappointments. In Bielawski’s stories, all readers can see themselves reflected. Real reflections, without any filters.
Michał Nogaś, Gazeta Wyborcza, Radio Książki, Książki. Magazyn do Czytania
In his work, Bielawski proves that both the period immediately after the fall of communism and the realities of contemporary Poland can be described politically without the use of concepts related to politics, economy or sociology. This seems to be Bielawski’s greatest strength as a writer.
Zofia Ulańska, artPapier
