The Boarding House by Piotr Paziński

In March, I posted my first of four reviews of books that have won the European Prize for Literature (EUPL) – the amazing Things That Fall From the Sky by Selja Ahava, which it one of the best books I’ve read this year. The EUPL is an annual prize that awards emerging authors from across 41 countries in Europe – the video at the bottom of this post explains a bit more. The prize is judged on the original language rather than the translation, but I don’t read Polish so I read The Boarding House in a translation by Tusia Dabrowska (or MJ Dabrowska, on over covers I’ve seen). The novel was an EUPL winner in 2012, though was originally published in 2009.

In the beginning, there were train tracks. In the greenery, between heaven and earth. With stations, like beads on a string, placed so close together that even before the train managed to accelerate, it had to slow down in preparation for the following stop. Platforms made of concrete, narrow and shaky, equipped with ladders and steep steps, grew straight out of sand, as though built on dunes. The station’s pavilions resembled old-fashioned kiosks: elongated, bent awnings, and azure letters on both ends, which appeared to float on air.

I’ve always enjoyed peering at them, beginning with the first station outside the strict limits of the city, when the crowded urban architecture quickly thins out and the world expands to an uncanny size.

Luckily, the tracks remained as I’d left them. They run straight ahead, in a decisive gesture, to melt with the horizon, from here barely visible, hidden behind nature, or, to the contrary – to disappear in a hidden tunnel hollowed out in the sky and then begin running again on the other side, in a completely different and unknown world.

The opening paragraphs of The Boarding House start with the opening words of the Bible – or, more aptly for this novel, the Torah. The narrator is Jewish, and the train he is taking is out to a distant Polish boarding house, which once doubled as a sanatorium. He has been there before as a child, when he spent his summers with a grandmother. The people who live there now – like his grandmother before them – are survivors of the Shoah, or Holocaust.

There is a dream-like quality to much of the novel. The narrator listens to the stories of those who live in the boarding house, many of whom seem to live half in the past and half in the present. This is echoed in the way the prose will wind back and forth, and you often find yourselves finishing a scene in a different time and place to where you started. The edges of sections are blurred.

The narrator is himself between times too – recalling his childhood, the inherited stories of the Holocaust, the current need that he taken him back to this place. It’s a novel filled with palimpsests – though also humour, and there is the usual mix of cantankerous characters, gossipy characters, pessimists and optimists stuck in a lengthy dialogue, held together in this boarding house in the middle of nowhere.

It’s an interesting novel, and it interestingly reveals a lot about the legacy of the appalling treatment of Jewish people during the 1930s and ’40s. The dreamlike quality of The Boarding House is both an asset and a drawback, depending on what mood you’re in – it’s hard to grasp anything concrete, or feel like you’re on steady ground as a reader at any point.

And I don’t know if Dabrowska’s translation accurately conveys this quality in the original novel, or if there are places where it isn’t quite working as a translation. As I say, I don’t read or speak Polish – but there were many places where the writing jarred a little for me. ‘This didn’t come across very cleverly’, for instance – that use of ‘cleverly’ doesn’t quite make sense. The narrator refers to a ‘freestanding closet’, rather than a wardrobe. I didn’t quite understand this sentence, even on several attempts: ‘The door creaked, so fearing that it might cause even more of a ruckus that would wake up the entire boarding house, I sneaked through the smallest crack possible.’ That’s a handful of minor instances, but there were several on every page. Perhaps it is there in the original, and is intended to disconcert the reader. I don’t know.

It’s a difficult one. I didn’t love this novel, and I never felt on solid ground reading it. But perhaps that is the point?