On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe - Hardcover

Stasiuk, Andrzej

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151012717 ISBN 13: 9780151012718

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011

Synopsis

Andrzej Stasiuk is a restless and indefatigable traveler. His journeys take him from his native Poland to Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine. By car, train, bus, ferry. To small towns and villages with unfamiliar-sounding yet strangely evocative names. “The heart of my Europe,” Stasiuk tells us, “beats in Sokolow, Podlaski, and in Husi, not in Vienna.” 

Where did Moldova end and Transylvania begin, he wonders as he is being driven at breakneck speed in an ancient Audi—loose wires hanging from the dashboard—by a driver in shorts and bare feet, a cross swinging on his chest. In Comrat, a funeral procession moves slowly down the main street, the open coffin on a pickup truck, an old woman dressed in black brushing away the flies above the face of the deceased. On to Soroca, a baroque-Byzantine-Tatar-Turkish encampment, to meet Gypsies. And all the way to Babadag, between the Baltic Coast and the Black Sea, where Stasiuk sees his first minaret, “simple and severe, a pencil pointed at the sky.” 

A brilliant tour of Europe’s dark underside—travel writing at its very best.

About this title

Review:

"Stasiuk is one of Poland's best-known contemporary authors and On the Road to Babadag is a welcome addition to his growing English-language corpus....Unfailingly stimulating and ably translated by Michael Kandel" (Toby Lichtig Times Literary Supplement)

"Stasiuk's journeys are vivid poetry... What formally also underpins Stasiuk's travels, and rather beautifully embodies his resistance to the future, is how his prose communicates the working of memory, mirroring its inconsequentiality. His accounts are fragmented, shuffled, continued later or not. Time breaks down as it is past; in his mind events cover space and time in an even, translucent layer" (Julian Evans Prospect)

"Now English readers can enjoy the rewards of Stasiuk's entrancing attempt to stand in the way of progress. It's an exceptional writer who can rise to such an impossible challenge" (Independent)

"A eulogy for the old Europe, the Europe both in and out of time, the Europe now lost in the folds of the map, On the Road to Babadag is valuable reading for UK readers. If we can't read our way around Europe, how will we ever find our place, our identity, within it?" (Guardian)

"At once powerful, punkish, angry, and disorientating in its quest to probe into Europe's dirty laundry" (Scotland on Sunday)

Book Description:

A brilliant and ground-breaking collection of travel narratives from Central and Eastern Europe.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0151012717
• ISBN 13: 9780151012718
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 255