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

Stasiuk, Andrzej

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1846550548 ISBN 13: 9781846550546

Publisher: Harvill Secker, 2011

Synopsis

Andrzej Stasiuk is a restless and indefatigable traveller. His journeys - by car, train, bus, ferry - take him from his native Poland to small towns and villages with unfamiliar yet evocative names in Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova and Ukraine.

'The heart of my Europe,' he writes 'beats in Sokolów, Podlaskie and in Husi, not in Vienna.' 'Where did Moldova end and Transylvania begin,' he wonders, as he is being driven at breakneck speed in a hundred-year-old 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 pick-up 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, near the shore of the Black Sea, where Stasiuk sees his first minaret, 'simple and severe, a pencil pointed at the sky'.

Here is an unfamiliar Europe, grappling with the remnants of the Communist era and the arrival of capitalism and globalisation. Original, precisely observed and lushly written meditations on travel and memory.

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: Harvill Secker
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1846550548
• ISBN 13: 9781846550546
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272