My summer reading in 2023.
“They are seven, moving through mapless, measureless land. They are surrounded by a no man’s world, a bloodstained bedsheet of earth, a shroud at dawn. No kingdom of kindness, just the tired, trampled football field that our millennium has become.” (my translation of the opening lines, with apologies to the author)
Piotr Siemion, lawyer, top manager and novelist with a rich personal experience in Western Europe and North America, has put 200 years of Polish sacrifice, guilt, domestic strife and strategic dilemma into a (logically dystopian) novel that neatly hovers between tragic past, alternate present and gloomy future. Europe (which is mentioned a lot by the protagonists) is in some kind of postwar situation but it’s never completely clear whether the fictional reality of the novel is closer to 1944, 1945, 1989 or 2022. There is even a reference to 1709 and a Swedish intervention (tough humanitarian this time). Refugees have left, people expelled elsewhere have arrived, and in between are Polish militias, leftovers of regular forces, Russian mercenaries and kids in the forest that survive through cannibalism.
There is a bit more clarity as to the place: somewhere in Pomerania, in a town whose architecture speaks German and which has one German name (Lanzig) and about ten different Polish ones (from Leńsko via Łancko to Łańcyk). Two of the protagonists also have several names like the heroes of Polish uprisings from 1830 to 1944. All the collective traumas and vitriolic debates, the homicidal, fratricidal and suicidal proclivities of Poland in the course of history are negotiated in almost mathematical permutations in the dialogues, with a confident feeling for sociolects and languages. And ‘Bella Ciao’, the perky musical antidote to oppression and misery is rendered in Swedish as well as Kashub (google that!). The separation of the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’ (where the worst of ‘them’ can be your own compatriots), the desperate oscillation between revolt and submission, the ‘Should I stay or should I go’ of generations of Poles tempted to just get up and leave for safer, richer and greener shores – it’s all there. Some of the dialogues between the two different Polish forces in ‘Bella Ciao’ sound like a copy pasted debate between the current government and opposition after a few drinks.
There is no shortage of cliffhanger scenes, and there is a surprise ending with a tiny ray of hope, as well as some nuanced characters without total villains or angels, but the strongest element of the novel is Piotr Siemion’s uncanny sense of continental vibes in the air. Slovenia’s heavy industrial band ‘Laibach’ may be politically difficult to bear and musically a bit tedious in recent decades, but in the early 1980s they managed to ‘predict’ the lethal identity politics at the root of the Balkan wars with an esthetic precision that no PoliSci pundit could muster at the time. Siemion wrote ‘Bella Ciao’ between 2015 and 2021 – so after Crimea and before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And by the time it was published, war crimes, torture and expulsions in Europe’s East had become the staple food of TV news and social media.
So, my non-Polish friends, ‘Bella, Ciao’ is well worth waiting for the English translation – and Piotr Siemion, apologies for any misinterpretations and mistakes. But I had to write this review before gong back to work!