Tadeusz Konwicki is fantastic, and no one is reading him these days. To the point where his works that have never been translated out of Polish seem to far out-number those that have. I've written about a few others here (the hit) and here (my favorite) and here (the ostensible-but-not-really kids adventure story).This one, notoriously, is about waiting in line all day for a shipment to a government jewelry store which may or may not ever arrive. Even so, it's an odysssey of sorts through modern...

"The Polish Complex" is the kind of existential comedy I aspire to write. A teaspoon of Beckett here, a pinch of Kafka there, an inexact and mesmerizing touch of Lispector. The book reads in many way like a play. I felt like I was reading or watching a play through much of the book, and at the same time, it really did transport me to a certain time and place so that I, too, was outside in the cold, and then inside, and then outside again. And then there were those strange interludes, one about Z...

Dear aliens,It is Christmas day, and I write this while at my parents’ house. A few moments ago, I was sitting by the window, which I had opened in an effort to tempt a Bengal kitten into joining the forces of evil, when above me I saw a bright light, and I thought of you. Or should I say, I thought of you in the hope that you would think of me. Which means that I, and this is typical of our species, acknowledged your potential existence only in so much as I would like you to acknowledge my actu...

Painfully dull and at the same time cringy. Quite a feat

Wicked powerful. There is nothing brittle nor forced about this bolt from the blue. The queue and the empty shelf have become symbols of something, but not the archaic. Our relative surfeit doesn't obscure the ghosts of our misdeeds.Konwicki glances sidelong at the prism of identity. Somewhere Fernand Braudel sighs.

I rather enjoyed this odd little book, which plays around and you can never be 100% sure what is fiction and what is autobiographical as the main character often uses the author's own name. First published in 1977 and set in the Poland of that time the main story centres on a group of Poles queuing for gifts from a jewelery store whilst they wait for a delivery of what they hope will be what they want. Although it is set after WWII, there are hints of it all the time. Queuing was a typical scene...

Ham-fisted, heavy-handed and as unsubtle as a pick-up truck with one of those stupid smog-wreaking giant phallic tailpipes being driven up your anus.This one was a little disappointing, coming chronologically as it does between the two other Konwicki novels I've read, both of which were great. "Complex" lacks much of black humor and pathos and subtlety that made the other novels such successes. "Complex" is very much in the tradition of the Iron Curtain novels of the 70s and early 80s, bemoaning...

A complex story, very brave for its day, sexist and dark in places, loved the descriptions of the forest and the tragic farce of the 1863 Uprising which was a taboo subsject when Konwicki wrote his book. Also appreciated the awful dilemna that people from the Polish Borderlands, the Kresy went throughwhen they were obliged to settle in what was for them a foreign country with a repressive and oppressive regime, another taboo subject then and not much touched on now.

There are parts of this book that are so essentially black and white, grainy film. The Communist era is so well-caught.... Excellent!By the way, I object to its being called "American Literature" - this is a Polish book!

Strasznie dziwna jest to książka. Nawet bardzo. Ma swoje plusy i minusy (sceny erotyczne?¿ Po co one?¿). Ale ważna, warto ją przeczytać. Nie mogłam sobie życzyć chyba lepszego początku i zakończenia (nie będę mówić o środku, jest najsłabszy). Bardzo podobało mi się ukazanie perspektyw Zygmunta Mineyko i Romualda Traugutta, a wraz z fragmentami o historii, wolności, polskich powstaniach i niewoli, nie mówiąc już o humorze Konwickiego, wszystko stanowiło zgraną całość, a może i nawet pewną – krótk...

I read this when I was in college, and it really blew my socks off. It came in a boxed set with Kundera (Laughable Loves) and Bruno Schultz (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen). Not only did it (and the other two) open up to me a whole world of (and way of) writing under censorship, but also literally a whole world (the Soviet satellites) and a whole history that was more or less dry and side-barred in school. This was also my introduction to Tadeusz Konwicki who is now a staple of my re...

Trudnawe, trochę rozrzucone, ale ciekawe

Had to quit about 3/4 in because of this protracted, unspeakably ugly sex scene between the narrator and another character. Konwicki had me for a bit, I'll admit. I enjoyed the narrative, especially the reflective parts that introduce the book and the narrator. That said, that one scene ruined the book and the author for me. To know that a man could come up with such a cringy way to describe sex just completely ruins anything else he may have to say in my eyes. No, seriously, I'm still at a loss...

3,5Dawno nie byłam tak niepewna, czy książka jest dobra, czy nie. Schemat akcji nie jest spoilerowy, a według niego dzielę opinię:1) kolejka – genialne, jakby Gombrowicz opisywał seriale Barei,2) powstanie – najpierw wybicie z rytmu (na Ninatece jest świetny audiobook, ale trudno się połapać bez tekstu na kartce), dziwna narracja; później wszystko pasuje, łączy się z tytułem, wspólnota polskości (albo polaczkowości), człowiek się wkręca i znowu...3) kolejka – najpierw zdziwienie, że to już konie...

I read this after reading a passage of Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory talking about the hopeless fights for freedom in the 19th century in the old forests of Lithuania/Poland against the Russians, and he quoted the end of the flashback section where Zygmunt had been given up to the Chechens working for the Cossacks. At that point I remembered I had The Polish Complex which I bought sometime in the 80s when I snagged every volume of Penguin's Writers from the Other Europe series, some of whi...

Very complex but timely. I see it as the rambling of an introspective human trying to figure out who a Pole is...other than a country that is continually shifted from one power hungry country to another. How do you retain your culture? Can you? Who are you in a world where increasingly, the "dictators" of the world get more power hungry and control as many of us as possible. The warning that behind the "democracies" lies a dictator in wait. And aren't we seeing this all over the world - not so s...

Intermittently brilliant, overwhelmingly foggy.

This book reminds me of a very controlled Dhalgren. It is achingly beautiful and irreverent as a streaker. Launching you with its exquisite imagery of the sacred right back into the human wasteland of the profane. Quotable passages emerge as if from a philosophy text. This book is hard to read, and it isn't. It is a text that is teachable and not talked about enough.

Nie wiem czemu Konwicki nie jest w głównym nurcie tak popularny jak Gombrowicz.Jego trzeźwe patrzenie na śmieszność bycia Polakiem i styl pisania są równie wyjątkowe.

A fantastic little book, and my first experience with Konwicki. At once a novel about spending Christmas Eve waiting in line at a jeweler store, hoping that a shipment of some value will arrive, it is also a book interspersed with meditations on sin, slavery, subjugation, rebellion, (lack of) understanding, communication, identity, and the like. All of this is tied up with the identity of not only Poland in a historical sense, but Poland specifically as it existed as a part of the Soviet Bloc.

Partiendo de una resignada fila que aguarda frente a una joyería, Tadeusz Konwicki intenta trazar el perfil de la Polonia que vio en su tiempo, con personajes que buscan resumir los anhelos, temores y dudas de años grises. Un ejercicio que a menudo se extravía en reflexiones y recuerdos, pero gana en honestidad.

I love books about Poland. This isn't anywhere near as intersting as "AMinor Apolcalyps" but an interesting character study of Poles in communist Poland and the Polish resistance in bot hWorld War II and back into the 19th centiry.

Not my cup of tea.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, this is my first book by Konwicki and I would definitely read another: what it was like to be Polish in 1977. Good stuff.