In this debut novel by the Polish writer Piotr Pázinski, a young man takes a train to a small town outside of Warsaw to visit a boarding house populated by the last generation of Polish Holocaust survivors.
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Winner of the European Union Prize for Literature. In this debut novel by the Polish writer Piotr Paziński, a young man takes a train to a small town outside of Warsaw to visit a boarding house populated by the last generation of Polish Holocaust survivors. When his grandmother was alive, he had spent a great deal of time at this boarding house, and now he returns, as if to get one last glimpse of the past―to look at old faces and think old thoughts. Paziński’s narrative is at once dreamlike and hard-nosed, and it is structured with the haunting simplicity of a fairy tale. The Boarding House is a meditation on the sad, sometimes terrifying moment when living memory becomes history and the living become the dead.
Piotr Paziński was born in Warsaw in 1973. The author of two books on James Joyce, his debut novel, The Boarding House, won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2012.
"Piotr Paziński avoids pathos when creating reality anew after it had been lost in the depths of time, and skilfully employs irony and wit. It is a philosophical tale about lasting, passing away and about decay, yet it is at the same time a literary rite of reviving memory; one of the first voices of the third generation of Holocaust survivors in Poland." (Polityka)
"The Boarding House explores the mystery of the melancholic identity, shaped not by experience, suffering or trauma, but by echoes, shadows and memories of memories." (Gazeta Wyborcza)