On the Other Hand is a short story collection by the award-winningSlovak author, Pavol Rankov. As the title implies, there is a duality to the stories in this volume – half of them are set in contemporary times and places and cover subjects such as immigration, refugees, drug use, and mental illness. The other half are set in distant lands with palaces and kings, and they read like fairy tales in which people dig to the other side of the Earth, build cities for the virtuous, and live alternate versions of their lives. The common thread in all of them is that Rankov takes a seemingly ordinary situation and pushes it to an extreme, and in doing so, he reveals some truth about human nature.
Reading Pavol Rankov’s short stories causes inner turmoil—it’s impossible
just to put the book down and go do something else. It could be
because his characters remind us of ourselves, with our desires, feelings,
and anxieties—except that they always go a step further than we’d dare.
Milena Schefs, Nowe książki
At the center are ordinary interpersonal relationships—“tight” relationships which arouse curiosity, attraction, jealousy, provocation… But it wouldn’t be Rankov if genres such as mystery, sci-fi, psychological drama, or thriller weren’t poking out between the lines.
Barbora Škovierová, Hospodárske noviny
That which I have called the philosohpical secret in Rankov’s work lies in unanswered and perhaps unanswerable puzzles that all good authors create out of banal situations or anecdotes. All of a sudden an anecdote grows to terrifying proportions, its resolution causes existential anxiety.
Adam Bžoch, Dotyky
Seven stories connected by a fifteenth-century map of the world. Once upon a time, maps used to exhibit the boundaries of the known world. They soothed our fears, and simultaneously ignited our imagination, uncharted territory beckoning us from afar. Barbara Sadurska`s The Map – belligerent and refreshing in tone, narratively picaresque and nostalgic, structurally non-linear and precisely framed – does not attempt to cover hackneyed ground. It goes much further. In entertaining, it instructs. In instructing, it terrifies. It illuminates the fact that man knows as little about himself as the first cartographers knew about the world. A novel from a puzzle This compendium of texts by Barbara Sadurska, International Short Story Festival laureate, might at first confuse the reader. In “Insomnia”, the book`s opening story, the sentences are cut short, the plot seems to be all over the place, and the reader is left with an unsolved mystery. And yet, intrigued and enchanted by the language, they wade further into the story in order to discover the missing pieces of the puzzle. The Map is hard to read as just a collection of short stories – or even as a novel; it is instead a `deconstructed novel`, the pieces of which do not seem to form a consistent plot, much like our own stories for which we never received a manual. The plotlines are seemingly unrelated – after all, what could connect such a range of real and fictional characters (from Fra Mauro, through Faust and Rembrandt, to an SS doctor and a member of the Polish secret service, to name but a few) over such a wide time period (from the 15th century to the 21st)? But somehow, the stories are tied together with a covert knot, each of them featuring the titular map and an etching of Faust. It is worth noting that the system of hidden bridges and subtle crossovers existing between the separate stories is not merely a sophisticated game for readers to uncover. One of the main themes of the stor(y)ies – barely surfacing over the layers of text at first (as in the hotel room scene in “Insomnia”, and in “Faust”), and later emerging more overtly – is the Holocaust. Paweł Jasnowski „Polityka”
A postman who develops close friendships with everyone on his postal route, an old man who stops buying the coal he needs to heat his flat so he can afford Christmas presents for his granddaughters, a senile old Holocaust survivor who’s suspicious of almost all her neighbours, two young sisters who are fed up with their baby brother, and an old woman squabbling with her tailor while a suit is being sewn for her to wear at her own funeral – these are just some of the intriguing characters we meet in Doctor Bianco and Other Stories. Written in terse, spare, unaffected prose devoid of sentimentality, the nineteen stories in this collection gradually reveal the portraits of various people inhabiting one particular apartment building in an unspecified town. The gritty, harsh realities faced by Bielawski’s protagonists are at times darkly funny and other times gut-wrenchingly sad. Bielawski sets up a magnifying glass on a small corner of Polish life and allows us to glimpse fascinating, surreal scenes from a tangle of human lives whose heartbreak, despair and various anxieties might feel surprisingly familiar to readers from any walk of life.
Brilliant, insightful snapshots of everyday reality.
Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature
Bielawski’s characters circulate in a greyish humdrum world, but their hopes and concerns bleed out of the page and become ours in these strange and endearing fictions.
Jonathan Gibbs, author of The Large Door
Maciek Bielawski uses simple language to describe simple human feelings. His sentences are uncomplicated and devoid of superfluous description. Although the emotions in Bielawski’s stories are described with subtlety, there is a great intensity to them – as there should be in all good short stories.
Mateusz Matyszkowicz, Polish National Radio
Maciek Bielawski already convinced readers that he can write wise, unsentimental prose about the harshness of life in Twarde parapety, a novel about growing up in Poland in the 1970s and 80s. In his new collection of short stories, Bielawski once again proves that what he writes – natural, unaffected, devoid of fireworks, though sometimes slightly surreal – is interesting, thought-provoking literature. His stories are often painful, but they come from the everyday reality that oppresses us – from emotions expressed too rarely, from numerous failures and disappointments. In Bielawski’s stories, all readers can see themselves reflected. Real reflections, without any filters.
Michał Nogaś, Gazeta Wyborcza, Radio Książki, Książki. Magazyn do Czytania
In his work, Bielawski proves that both the period immediately after the fall of communism and the realities of contemporary Poland can be described politically without the use of concepts related to politics, economy or sociology. This seems to be Bielawski’s greatest strength as a writer.
Zofia Ulańska, artPapier
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