On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe

Author(s): Andrzej Stasiuk

Rest of Europe/Russia/Scandinavia

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


 


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 Sokolow, 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. This title offers original, precisely observed and lushly written meditations on travel and memory.


Product Information

Born in Warsaw in 1960, Andrzej Stasiuk has risen to become one of the most important and interesting writers at work in Eastern Europe today. Author of over a dozen books and winner of many prizes, he came to writing in an unusual way: In the early 1980s, he deserted the army and spent a year and a half in prison for it. Afterwards he wrote a collection of short stories, The Walls of Hebron, about his experience, which became a huge success. He and his wife, Monika Sznajderman, run a small publishing house in Czarne.

General Fields

  • : 9780099507147
  • : Vintage
  • : Vintage
  • : July 2012
  • : 198mm X 129mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : August 2012
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Andrzej Stasiuk
  • : Paperback
  • : 914.04
  • : 272
  • : Illustrations, map