Theme:  Eastern Europe



Friends, I can't begin to tell you how much I love me a confessional novel about a Polish down and out alcoholic in rehab. And not because Salonica is turning one year old and feel like having the fete of the decade. And no, The Mighty Angel by Jerzy Pilch is not an adaptation of a reality television show.  What this is is a pure matter-of-fact, tell-it-like-it-t-i-s tale of a boozing writer trying to get it together.  Rather figuring out if he wants to actually get it together or not.  Now don't go thinking this is a downer of a book.  Despite it all, the narrator Jerzy(maybe or maybe not named after the author) has a twinkle in his pie-eyed prose.  And although we are not sure if narrator is author or author is narrator, there is a definite sobriety to the telling of the tale.  Not only is Jerzy, the narrator, an alcoholic, but he has also been in rehab eighteen times and after each release, he has eighteen times gone directly to The Might Angel Pub to swallow four double shots before he goes to find more liquor.  Why, you ask?  His replies,"Why not?"  And so we accompany him on his jaunt down dipsomaniac lane. 

And a light came on on the twelfth floor, and it stayed on without a break for forty days and nights; for forty days and nights I drank without a break.  The bulb shone above my insensate body; dawns rose and evenings fell, my insensate hand reached for the bottle and poured vodka into my insensate throat, my bedding and my skin acquired a corneous exoskeleton of dried puke, destruction followed destruction across my apartment.  Dear Lord, the mess that Joanna Catastrophe created was exemplary order compared with what I left behind me when I writhed about on all fours in search of a bottle that had been hidden away for a rainy day (and had long ago been consumed by my numbed innards, as the rainy day had long since come and gone, and all the days that followed were also rainy, each one rainier than the next), or when, in a viscous glimmer of lucidity, I crawled to the telephone to phone in my ritual shopping order: Two bottles of Premium peach-flavored vodka and a liter of Coke, please.  I give the address.  Under communism there was no shopping by phone.

I've so often wanted to write a story of someone bringing themselves back from ruin, so often, such an untold number of times, that when finally, by an incomprehensible coincidence I myself was bringing myself back from ruin, when I myself was being brought back from ruin, when someone's visible or invisible hand was lifting me out of that cavernous pit, I could not keep pace with my own recovery.  I'm not capable of describing my own liberation as a series of plausible events; I lack the ability to convey the evolutionary history of my own resurrection--I present only these epiphanic stanzas, though my resurrection too was like an epiphany, like a haiku; it was like a single line of poetry, unerring as lightening.