Flaw

Description

Refugees cause a surreal disruption in a quiet suburb. A prescient allegory of extermination. A single streetcar line runs around the sleepy square of an unnamed city. One day - out of nowhere - refugees pour from the streetcar and set up camp in the square. The residents grow hostile and eventually take extreme action.

Magdalena Tulli's other novels includeDreams and StonesandMoving Parts, nominated for the 2006 International IMPACDublin Literary Award, and In Red. Flaw has been shortlisted for the 2007 Nike Prize, Poland's most prestigious literary award. Tulli is also the translator of Proust and Calvino into Polish. She lives in Warsaw. Bill Johnston is the Chair of the Comparative Literature Department at Indiana University. His translations include Wies?aw My?liwski s Stone Upon Stone, and Magdalens Tulli s Dreams and Stones, Moving Parts, and In Red. His 2008 translation of Tadeusz R ?ewicz s new poems won the inaugural Found in Translation Prize and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Poetry Award.

The originality of Tulli's writing is not lessened by representing a family tree that includes Michaux, Kafka, Calvino, and Saramago. -W.S. Merwin Powerful imagery caught in sinewy, architectural, elegiac prose. -Anne Waldman Like all great works of art, Tulli's books create something new, something that doesn't respond to what the reader has been conditioned to expect. -Rain Taxi Descartes famously entertained the suspicion that the whole of reality was nothing but a devilish imposition upon our imaginations, and in Flaw, Magdalena Tulli, an extraordinary Polish writer who is as much cosmologist as novelist, has fashioned a theater of reality that Descartes' devil might have dreamed up, a world of sinister politics and slapstick metaphysics, crowded with lonely hearts, refugees, and riot police. The book is coolly charming, funny, and heartbreaking. Even the devil should weep. -Edwin Frank Johnston has rendered brilliantly Tulli's distinctive narrative voice in Flaw-coolly objective, unimpassioned, disembodied, belonging to no one in particular even when it occasionally adopts one or another character's point of view. Faithful to the Polish in every way that is meaningful, Johnston's translation is also a beautiful piece of English prose narrative. -Slavic and East European Journal Each successive book of Tulli's, from Dreams and Stones to Flaw, not only demonstrates the author's consummate talent, but also ever more clearly defines the independence of her artistic vision. Far from being some reiteration of the avant-garde, Tulli's writing is something enchantingly different from the Polish prose of today and of earlier times. -Tygodnik Powszechny