Snow White and Russian Red
by Dorota Maslowska, translated by Benjamin Paloff
(Black Cat) $13
Dorota Maslowska, just 19 years old when her brutally comic first novel, Snow White and Russian Red, first appeared in 2002, has been hailed by European critics as brilliant and “the hope of Polish literature.” The book was a finalist, alongside the work of two Nobel laureates, for Poland’s most prestigious literary award and has subsequently been translated into 11 languages. Finally, with the release of an American edition, readers here can see what all the fuss is about.
The book describes a few days in the life of the narrator Andrzej Robakoski, AKA Nails, as he lurches through lower-middle-class Polish streets (“At any rate, like I’ve said, the economic situation in the country is categorically fucked…”), reels from a breakup with his girlfriend Magda-a slinky, beguiling girl with “long bright hair, like a wall, like branches,” snorts copious amounts of speed (“that magical welfare for the unemployed”), deflowers a 17-year-old vegan who vomits stones into his bathtub, buries his dog Bitchy in his front yard, attends an anti-Russian rally, gets arrested, and dies or doesn’t die as the novel derails in its disappointing finale.
The voice that drives the novel has the power to bring a whole jittery world into focus; it paints, in the dark-hued, lurid colors of a sick cartoon, the look and feel of a Poland gone amok-still shadowed by the gloom and deprivations of Communism, yet hardly comforted by the garish promises of global capitalism.
Nails cracks the window shade and tells us what he sees:
The sun’s bigger. Fatter, lardy, like a parasite gnawing away at us. It fucks you in the eyes. Without mercy… Now there’s hardly any colors in the world. None. A lack. The colors were stolen in the night. Or whatever. Maybe washed out. Maybe they washed out that landscape, that country scene out the window in a washing machine with not quite the right detergent. The kind of number my old lady once did on my jeans, too.
Rendering oneself of no use to a washed-out, hostile, or soul-crushing society by drinking or smoking or shooting or snorting is hardly anything new. But what saves Maslowska’s novel from falling into the clichés of druggy fiction is its unique stylistic energy and its cast of vividly twisted characters. Here’s Nails describing Angela, the stone-vomiting vegan: “She looks as though a minute ago she’d dragged herself out of a river in which she’d drowned a month before. And in the meantime the dragon-flies have shit all over her. I look at her. She’s not pretty.”
The jarring, hyperbolic wit, syntactically ruptured cadences, and violent, often hilarious distortions bring to mind the masterpieces of Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At its best Snow White and Russian Red is both fever dream and laugh-out-loud shock treatment-in other words, a book to get excited about. Benjamin Paloff’s translation has a great deal going for it; it capably captures Maslowska’s dissonant lyricism and the unhinged, desultory movement of her narrator’s impressions. But one senses that Paloff shares some of the blame for the way things fall apart in the end.
The danger of writing a novel in the first-person present tense is that its world gets claustrophobically reduced to the undigested perceptions of the narrator, and by the end of Snow White and Russian Red our closeness to Nails, and his “raging case of fuck-off-itis,” which for much of the novel was hilarious and exhilarating, becomes instead a source of frustration and confusion. As our brain-fried narrator approaches the very edge of his life, Maslowska’s narrative grows more and more opaque until the writing seems to veer out of control and finally flattens out completely, first into gimmicky metafiction (“That’s right, Andrzej, delude yourself, cooperate with the photomontage that Masloska [sic] cooked up for your needs…”) and then, even more preposterously, into an unintelligible, rather hackneyed stream of consciousness.
Is this a postmodern comment on the fragility of our fictional worlds? Is this an attempt to make form mirror content by inducing a narrative burnout, so to speak? If so, this raw, caustic, frequently impressive book sacrifices itself to the fire in a bold though ultimately failed experiment.