Id of Europe - Chapter Five - Extract

Chapter Five

Russia wasn’t somewhere you went to in September 1998. It was somewhere you fled from. The clues to that were written all over the TV set whenever Steve switched it on. The only surprise he noted when he saw the hundreds of forlorn looking people queuing to take out their savings before the ruble plummeted even further was that most weren’t wearing rabbit-skin hats and heavy coats, but light clothing as the season demanded, it being August.

Despite fetishising Russia for much of his life, the notion that the country had seasons just as any other had never managed to impress itself on Steve. The sight of them in t-shirts, shielding their brows from the sun while they watched the queue move snail-like to the liberation of their money from their cursed accounts, jolted Steve as almost as much as the news that the country had plunged into chaos.

There came a point that he just did not want to go, with so many of his friends and workmates giving him earache about how Russia was a no-go land. He seriously hated the visa he’d applied for, wherever it was and whatever it was doing, perhaps lying somewhere in a dusty office with his passport. He had redundancy money, so he didn’t need to worry where he was at this juncture. The lunacy of St Petersburg raged a long way outside Steve’s door, for now.

Yet a couple of weeks later he did turn up in all trepidation at Pulkovo airport, laden with luggage and wondering whether to get back on the next plane home, a thought that would dog him in the weeks to come.

As it turned out, leaving was not an option. It would take something drastic to pull him away from the flat he ended up in where he could suit himself completely. He was renting it from two kindly pensioners who had moved out from the place after the crash had almost ruined them. Give or take those periodic days of darkness when the hangovers made him loath his students, particularly on a Monday, he also seemed to be putting on a real show at the school where he worked. Whereas every class he gave at the college was a lesson in conflict management, the language school’s ‘clients’ were models of motivation and, at times, admiration at Steve’s, frankly, often lackadaisical efforts in front of the white board. Despite the mood swings, Steve was these days blessed wherever he walked.

The country he’d landed in was going through yet another period of rotten luck and Steve felt it keenly, if only because he was heading in the opposite direction. The 1998 crisis in Russia when most of the population saw their salaries and savings halved overnight was a Godsend to Steve’s pocket, bulging with the cash he’d gained from his voluntary redundancy settlement. He’d go to empty restaurants with his new girlfriends and treat them to a meal they could only dream of if they hadn’t met him, and to him the whole thing cost nothing. Then, occasionally, he would even get to fuck them. Compared to back home, it was joy.

Then it was onto Nevsky Prospekt, the pavement after the bar or restaurant. The limbless war veterans, the elderly beggars weeping, the guys hawking CDs. Dodging them seemed like a week’s energy, but it was also a wake-up call, one he could deal with by dousing his troubled mind with drink yet again.

Sex was the best thing about St. Petersburg, the cultural capital of Russia, at the end of the day, not the booze. Okay, he would give a nod and a wink to the galleries, architecture and concert halls, but if Steve could have expressed himself openly then he would have pointed to some mini-skirted woman as the most vital cause of him wanting to stay close to his new home. He didn’t feel at all crude for thinking so, either. Steve was finally face-to-face with freedom.

Reflections on a Decade in the Wild East - Extract continued

Reflections on a Decade in the Wild East

Chapter One – Extract extended

Alexander Nevsky metro station in St Petersburg, November 1998. It’s pitch black dark and around 9.30 am on a Tuesday morning.

I have just come back from a one-to-one lesson at Philip Morris, the tobacco company, which began at 7.30am and ended at 9am, my student driving me to and from the station in his company logo-emblazoned car.

I never had any problem spotting him. His car just looked ridiculous among the mud-splattered Ladas whizzing around like fairground dodgems, but Kostia always emerged from his vehicle as if the incongruity had never occurred to him and he shook my hand. Among the things I remember about our classes, other than he was very affable and a bit nervous was that he smoked constantly, as with many tobacco company employees in Russia at the time. Though I loathed having to teach at that hour of the day, the office was nice and snug and you could freely fill up your coffee cup as you could smoke. One of my colleagues gave the thumbs up to this, I remember, puffing away at the gratis fags as she waited for her student to finish his phone call. But as a non-smoker there was nothing in that for me.

My major gripe was that the lesson began at an unearthly hour in the morning without sunlight and ended in the same circumstances. It had been given to me by the school’s director of studies, who had been Kostia’s teacher but wanted a lie-in now that I had arrived. She was someone I never warmed to, for that reason and many others.

Returning to Alexander Nevsky station that winter morning I see a group of young women, aged perhaps 18 or 19, drinking beer. Baltika 7 is the brand and a very strong one it is too. The girls are all very pretty and in high spirits, despite the fact that Russia is apparently in a state of collapse. They are a world away from Philip Morris and its chain-smoking, coffee drinking workaholics. It’s difficult to decide which is the healthier lifestyle choice. But I am impressed by the casual demeanour of these women, indifferent to the potential opinions of others, dimly viewing their pre-sunrise beer swigging. They chat and laugh too, belying the image of the morning drinker as some soaked, decrepit belligerent. I find the scene alluring. Amid the economic devastation, and early-week blues they are having fun when everyone else, including me, isn’t.
 

In Serbia 20 years later, I see the opposite. The women are just as breathtakingly gorgeous, yet for most of them alcohol is anathema, a tool of the elderly and lost in society, they say, yet many of these girls are also out of work. Why else would they be in cafes at 10am on a Tuesday morning sipping coffees and smoking cigarettes in Belgrade’s abundant cafes?

They did it in militant fashion, in vast numbers. When leisure descended upon them clusters of beauties nattered together, while the male lusted fruitlessly at a distance. They even did it when men rioted. When in July 2008 Radovan Karadzic was arrested by the Serbia’s Special Forces to be sent to The Hague, there was a mass protest in the centre of Belgrade. Stones were thrown at the riot police and they flew near the large windows displaying the grand cafeteria at the Hotel Moskva on Terazije. As usual, the coffee sippers and nicotine imbibers were out in force, and not uncommonly most appeared to be women, yet none batted a prettified eyelid. The scene made me trip over some rubble in consternation. 

This was a true culture shock. Fags and coffee are not downers. They are among the strongest emblems of stress in the contemporary age. But your average Serbian woman appears to seek them as a refuge. 

 “They’re not”, you want to tell them. “They’ll make you tense.” “Perhaps, you should have a proper drink.” 

But aside from a few excellent examples among Serbian womanhood, you’d be ignored. Put it down to the caffeine and tobacco. 

Polish women, on the other hand, like a good old knees up and a dance and can do the vodka shots like anyone but they do not laugh at drunks as the Russians often did when I was in St Petersburg. Drunkenness in a man for a Polish woman is a disgrace, which does not mean they don’t put up with it on a longish-term basis. They share, reluctantly, very at times, in the Russians’ romanticizing of the inebriate.

In Poland drunkenness is often dimly viewed by those who are themselves drunk, women in particular. If they get shitfaced and are unable to walk, woe-betide the man of theirs who is in the same condition. He is a complete fucking loser. 

Yet Russian women would revel in your mutual collapse of morals, in my time there. And they could be far more pornographic than me. That was a revelation. Woman more predatory than men. I loved it but sometimes found it overwhelming. I couldn’t match the eager passion because of my own limitations. It’s called being a ‘Westerner’.

Sometimes they would even call you when on occasion you had forgotten who they were. The dringing of a dilapidated landline phone, when at three in the afternoon you were recovering from an extraordinarily egotistical hangover would rankle. I was getting stupidly snippy with a Goddess at the other end of the line.

Women in the Eastern European countries I have lived in are in general very warm, down-to-earth and a lot of very good fun, but within each resides a princess wanting his prince, no matter how impossible this will be to achieve. But there is not a man on earth who could match any of them. And why try to?

Archive Article: Polish Metafiction: Moving Parts by Magdalena Tulli

Originally published by the now-defunct WiK English Edition, part of Poland’s reputed Wprost publishing house, in May 2007

Polish Metafiction: Moving Parts by Magdalena Tulli

The self-referential ruse that literary fiction indulged itself in in the 1970s and 1980s has long seemed a thing of the past, with readers now apparently far too knowing to fall for a trick which constantly reminds them that what they are reading has been made up.

So, to try the ‘metafictional’ route with a novel written in the latter part of the twentieth century’s first decade is a very bold move indeed but one that the Warsaw-based writer Magdalena Tulli takes without any reticence.

In a book where the only character of any resilience is ‘the narrator’, the phantom-like presence who fails miserably to spin a decent yarn but is the only ‘person’ to make it through the book from uncertain beginning to an end where all unravels before his eyes, Tulli takes us on a journey in which an initially solid cast of characters melts into air with each turn of the page.

Although this oblique tale does recycle the well-worn trick of reminding the reader that he/she ‘produces’ the writing as much as receives it by picking up a book, it does so in a highly-rigorous manner that required a good deal of intellectual bravery from Tulli. In the first pages we are reminded that to create a narrative - with plot-line, characters and themes - is an absurdly difficult task which is almost doomed to failure before the writer sets about his or her task, trapped as he/she is in the limitations of language. But then Tulli sets about undermining this - her own assumption - by creating metaphors for the writing process which sporadically germinate into mini-stories of their own, until they too dissolve under the apparent difficulty of keeping them alive.

So, for instance, we are first introduced to a pair of trapeze artistes who are sitting with one another in a hotel but have only been conceived into being by virtue of a circus trope that the ‘author’ has conjured for creative act of putting pen to paper in the first place.

And so it goes on. At times, we slip back into a dry, almost barren examination of the tribulations of the writer’s craft, then at others this blossoms into another page-turning mini-tale, which will either come to a grinding halt, only to reappear again later along the ‘story’, or drift ethereally beyond the reader’s memory altogether.

European literature used to pat itself on the back about this type of novel before post-modernism allowed itself to become another form of pap, in which reading became ‘easy’ once again. Some people will be turned off after the first five pages but that is their loss. True escapism from the rough and tumble of everyday life in the end comes in the form of true engagement with what makes it all so difficult.

Archive Article: From Horror to Terror: The Documentaries of Maciej Drygas

Originally published by the now-defunct WiK English Edition, part of Poland’s reputed Wprost publishing house, in June 2007

From Horror to Terror: The Documentaries of Maciej Drygas

The sublime series of documentary film collections published by the state-run Polish Audiovisual Publishers (PWA) may to some seem dour because of their preoccupation with the Communist past. Flickering, black and white images of awkwardly dressed people ill at ease in front of the camera may not be everyone’s cup of tea, particularly those who like their celluloid loud, fast and blazing in colour.

Unless you are equipped with the necessary patience and – dare one say it – intellectual sensitivity, it is true that PWA’s previous two documentary offerings, those of Krzysztof Kieslowski and Kazimierz Karabasz, can be very demanding on the attention span. For the most part, the stars in these films are people who have done nothing but live lives which often seem more ordinary than our own. Yet it is here that the directors’ genius lies: apparently grim drudgery becomes universal drama at its most breathtaking through their lenses.

In the latest collection released by PWA director Maciej Drygas largely eschews the day-to-day in favour of events and activities during the Communist period that truly did impact massively on history. Born in 1956 and somewhat younger than Kieslowski and Karabasz, Drygas interrogates the era reflectively rather than as it was actually happening, the forte of his elders. And as all of these films were made after the fall of Communism they are boosted incalculably by a freedom of expression the other directors in the series could never have dreamt of.

The effect of Drygas’ films is to imbue Communism with a powerful and even attractive exoticism, which Kiewslowski and Karabasz can only match by portraying their protagonists as endearingly down-to-earth, showing us that getting on with things rather than constant terror was the essence of their lives.

Yet in the Drygas collection terror, as well as horror, feature largely and pack an emotional punch that will have you reeling, perhaps for as long as you live.

In an sense, the DVD’s two sides can be divided along the motifs of ‘terror’ on the one hand and ‘horror’ on the other, though it does this somewhat in reverse order,  with the most shocking revelations assailing you at the off on side one. The totalitarian maneuver of frightening you senseless by increments, rather than by beating you to a pulp every day, is strangely most salient in the films on side two. Perhaps this was a deliberate attempt to go against the grain: just as the viewer is gawping in disbelief at what human beings can do to others and even themselves, you then lead them through a narrative which tells them how this all came to pass, instead of trudging through a linear plot which erupts all too predictably at the denouement.

To press the point even further, it is the very first film which is by far the most harrowing to watch. Entitled ‘Hear my Cry’ (1991) it chronicles the days and moments leading up to and the bereft, endless years afterwards of the act of a sixty year-old accountant, Ryszard Siwiec, who set fire to himself in protest at the injustices carried out by the Communist regime. His anger was directed primarily against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia with the self-immolation happening in 1968 among a crowd gathered at the Stadion Dziesieciolecia in Warsaw for a harvest festival. Brilliantly blending archive footage with interviews with the man’s family and those who witnessed the protest, Drygas offers us penetrating insight into the state of mind of a person about to destroy himself in such a premeditated manner, yet tragically unaware that his action would have no impact on the political situation of the time. The authorities were easily able to dismiss him publically as a lunatic and knowledge of his sacrifice was repressed for a whole two decades. Its revelation, even now in 2007, is gut wrenching but the final few minutes of the film are truly some of the most skillfully crafted and awe-inspiring ever to hit the screen. The time for talking is over, Drygas seems to be telling us. Let the incomprehensible agony of this man’s protest itself take centre stage.

The horror in the next film – State of Weightlessness (1994) - is a lot less salient but no less startling when it rises from amid a general celebration of man’s pioneering journey into the unknown. The Russian cosmonauts who are the subject of the film speak of how their childhood ambitions to conquer space came true in unimaginable ways, from how in orbit night turns to day and then back again in a matter of minutes to how a terrible, crushing homesickness overcomes those who have launched themselves beyond earth. But despite these reality checks on their boyhood marvels their enthusiasm for their project of exploring the universe remain undimmed, as does their sense of pride that it was the Soviets who were first up there in the starry skies in the space race ahead of the Americans.

The film marks a departure from the rest in the series in that it is the only one in Russian and one which on the whole brims with optimism and a sense of achievement. But then the dark side emerges, footage of which Drygas drags to the surface as if kicking and screaming. It begins gruesomely enough, with Soviet scientists experimenting on dogs and monkeys to see how they cope with demands of simulated space travel. The fear and confusion writ across their faces as they are tethered to boards, then spun around at lightning speed, is a harbinger to the biggest revelation, that the cosmonauts themselves were subject to medical experiments on their return to earth, from which many never recovered, leaving them in a vegetative state. We see one pushing an erstwhile colleague around in a wheelchair but then later telling the camera that, despite all, he has no regrets, because he managed to see what most of us never will.

The entries on side two dwell on phenomena rather than events and the pace of perception slows down. At first Drygas charts the history of Radio Free Europe and the Communists’ attempts to jam its signals, setting off a Cold War of the airwaves. He interviews both the jammers and those that struggled hard to set up transmitters so that they could hear the station. One dissident tells of how he wrote up the whole of George Orwell’s novel 1984 – at the time read aloud by Radio Free Europe – then distributed it among friends and acquaintances. Then regarded as a second class citizen, he is seen as a hero now.

The final film is when Drygas ventures into territory occupied by his mentors, that of the everyday life of Communist existence, only with the benefit of hindsight he does things rather differently. Entitled ‘One Day in the Life of People’s Poland’ the director presents us with endless reels of ordinary Poles going about their normal business, while a voice-over recounts genuine secret police reports, customer complaints and letters to newspapers that reveal the true nasty, bitter, small-minded repression that was at work at the time, as well as people’s growing impatience with it.

Archive Article: The Documentaries of Kazimierz Karabasz

Originally published by the now-defunct WiK English Edition, part of Poland’s reputed Wprost publishing house, January 2007

Kazimierz Karabasz: Democracy in Action

The documentary films of Kazimierz Karabasz, as seen today in the context of no holds barred capitalism, are often hard work. The gentle, melancholic music that frequently prefaces the films often feels far too plaintive an introduction to what, after all, are claims on one’s precious leisure time. And then there is his preoccupation with photography, which in this age of kinetic fetishism looks like an outlandish Luddite indulgence, at least at first glance.

Learning that Karabasz – now 76 years of age – was mentor to the vastly more famous Krzysztof Kieslowski, as well as a number of other Polish film makers, may come as a surprise to anyone watching his work for the first time. For as with his disciple, Kieslowski, not so long ago, a collection of Karabasz’s documentaries have just been released on DVD, accompanied by English subtitles.

The first temptation would seem to be to regard the collection as a history lesson into the life and times of the Communist period, rather than films that stand on their own timeless merits. Unlike Kieslowski, Karabasz was ostensibly less concerned to transcend the here and now to speak to generations in a future he could never have foreseen. Indeed, some of the documentaries, such as ‘On the Threshold (1965)’, seem horribly stilted by today’s standards of uninhibited informality. Introduced by an overly earnest narrator, we are told that the purpose of the film is to examine the hopes and dreams of young women about to graduate from college. Yet their coyness, coupled with the stiff methodology of the film-making, brings us no nearer to what makes them tick, and all we’re left with is a profound sense of relief that the world has moved on since then.

Others are as much steeped in an ordinariness which again can be quite frustrating, but are accompanied by a sense of disquiet that forces you to keep watching. ‘A Year in the Life of Franek W. (1967)’, for instance, is a study of a young man working for the Voluntary Labour Corps in Silesia in the mid-1960s. Chosen for his almost spectacular lack of charisma, the subject, Franek W., inadvertently became a revolutionary symbol for Polish documentary film-making, which had hitherto stipulated that only the group, and not the individual, was appropriate material. On their own, people could not be expected to behave naturally in front of a camera, it was held.

It is a testimony to the vastly different universes that we and Franek W. occupy that he conducted himself with such an unbelievable lack of self-consciousness. These days pointing a camera at someone usually adds a layer to their character, which is frequently very annoying. But watching Franek W. go about the humiliations of his day without an ounce of the opportunism we associate with being on film is quite simply mind-blowing.

For Karabasz, poise and perspective are of the essence. Given the technical limitations at the time of most of his work, this is hardly surprising. You could hardly dash about capturing the hustle and bustle of daily life when you had a ton of equipment to lug around with you. But then, as he proved, you didn’t need to hurry anyway. Place the camera on a roof and let the world scurry around down below, or even, just use photographs. One of the more haunting entries on the DVD is ‘Portrait in a Drop of Water’, one of the most modern of his films as it was made in 1997, yet one that keeps faith to an unpretentious ethos spanning five decades.

A film made up simply of a slide-show of photographs with the voices of ordinary citizens wandering in and out over them, Karabasz’s obsession once again comes pouring through. Let the people speak - of their everyday frustrations, of anything that is on their mind – and simply let the rest of us watch it.

 

Archive Article: Krakow: Hostage to the Stag-Lads

 

Originally published by the now-defunct WiK English Edition, part of Poland’s reputed Wprost publishing house, in November 2006

Krakow: Hostage to the Stag-Lads

Krakow – the jewel in Poland’s urban crown - has lost its innocence and let there be no mistake about it. The city, so romanticised by anyone yearning for a weekend away to chill out, sip drinks in and around the tiny bars and stroll about admiring the historical splendour, has almost become just another of Europe’s new cluster of theme parks as conceived by the budget airlines.

Most nations play host to two cities which see one another as rivals and whose temperaments are perceived as clashing, and often this cultural battle plays a large part in defining the country’s character as a whole. Think New York and Los Angeles, St. Petersburg and Moscow, Barcelona and Madrid. And so it is with Warsaw and Krakow, but the contrasts between the two – so vital to providing wholesome leisurely debate about the relative merits of either – are slowly being eroded by Krakow’s growing and, ultimately debilitating, reputation as the pub crawl centre of Europe.

Nobody likes to crawl around pubs more than me, and I certainly did it on my most recent trip to Krakow. It is very difficult to knock a place where you can stroll into just about any bar or club, via a cursory once-over from the door staff, order a beer for PLN 6 and then go and mingle, or at least try to. The differences between that experience and any on offer in Warsaw are clear. The face control beasts have yet to set up shop in Krakow, and long may it continue, but there is very little that is noble in this apparently democratic sentiment. All are welcome into the city’s subterranean drinking establishments, just as long as they spend their money, which is fair enough, but once you have been into one bar or club in the Old Town Square, you feel as if you have been to them all. No-one seems keen on establishing a niche offering anything that little bit different than a chance to indulge in a multi-vodka piss-up.

Of course the leading culprit in all this is the British stag night, which has pretty much laid the Czech Republic capital Prague to consumerist ruin in a matter of years. A night in Krakow makes you realise the lads are hell-bent on doing the same there as well.

It isn’t that they are troublemakers it’s just that they have become such a dull and accepted part of the landscape. Take any Old Town Square dancefloor at, say, 2am in the morning. The scene invariably consists of two pairs of Polish girls strutting their stuff, when a group of four British blokes meanders onto the tiles, and begins to indulge in a collectively clumsy attempt to advertise their supposed sexual prowess. Laughs and giggles are normally the response, yet the girls seem to find them intriguing just the same, even though, or perhaps because, they are all wearing mocked-up Polish football shirts, and the name “Bestmanski”  is brandished on the back of one of them.

A weekend in Krakow coupled with reports of Polish immigrants’ behaviour in the UK has lead me to conclude that maybe the Polish and British governments have hatched a deal of some sort. I imagine something like this, with the Polish side making the initial proposition:

“If you let our bus drivers, from let’s say Bialystok, come over and reap havoc on your roads, then we will allow countless numbers of your countrymen, from towns such as Hartlepool, to come and besmirch our once noble tourist attractions.”

Which is what EU membership is all about, I suppose.

Yet Krakow still oozes charm, though I am surprised the city has not tried to sell that per portion either. My pub crawl ended outside a supermarket at dawn with two Polish blokes and a couple of Germans, with whom I made great conversation, which was interspersed with forays into the shop for another beer. It was nice to know that street-level conviviality did not necessarily have to lead to a spell in the drunk tank, I thought, unlike in Warsaw. But that was until we watched in amazement as the police wrestled a local ‘drunk’ into their car, when they could quite easily have chosen any, if not all, of us. The besuited German businessmen most probably acted as the main deterrent, rather than the Polish students or British journalist.

However, the highlight of that night was when I was alone walking back to the hotel. I was passing through the Old Town square and immediately noticed that apart from some municipal workers sweeping up, I was the only person there. A mist hung over the city and I at once recognised the stunning place I first visited 14 years earlier.

Empty, Krakow beats all in its beauty. The silence, despite the scraping of brooms, lent the Old Town an imposing aura that had been lost amid the insane throng of visitors some hours earlier. Then, a smog of people enveloped the town, but now, despite the mist, all seemed very clear.

The Town Hall Tower - the top part of which was hidden by an early morning fog - mated with the wafts of inebriation in my skull and sundered steps over the cobblestones, to reign over a serenity so powerful, you felt the tourists and their stag night half-cousins would never dare step foot in the place again.

And then, only six hours later, dodging the bodies and licking at my big, tall anti-hangover ice-cream, they were all back again. Thousands of them: riding on horse carts, zipping around on rickshaws and staggering about drunk in identical t-shirts. Just don’t tell me that Krakow hasn’t changed.

Archive Article - Polish Author's Car-Friendly Novel

Originally published by the now-defunct WiK English Edition, part of Poland’s reputed Wprost publishing house, in April 2007

Writing in the Fast Lane - ‘Mercedes-Benz’ by Pawel Huelle

The car is a much-maligned machine these days for all the trouble it causes. Congestion, pollution and road-rage are just a few of the vices it has demanded the world get used to, and many of its advocates have been noted for their self-centred boorishness.

But in Pawel Huelle’s universe the automobile is a largely benign creature, providing people with a vital hook to their family histories, acting as a source of intimate conversation and facilitating the freedom to roam.

Openly autobiographical, ‘Mercedes-Benz’ is a neatly-woven tale which takes in three generations of Huelles and their various relationships with their vehicles. The author as narrator is in the process of learning to drive in the capable and affable hands of a Miss Ciwle - whose charms Huelle is clearly smitten by – in the early 1990s just after the fall of Communism. And it is at the wheel that he distracts her with the sometimes absurd, often funny and always moving tales of his grandparents, then his parents’ trials and tribulations with their cars.

‘Mercedes-Benz’ could easily have been entitled ‘The History of Poland in the 20^th Century, As Seen Through a Windscreen’, for each generation of his family is shown trundling around different parts of the country at pivotal moments in its turbulent past.

Huelle’s grandparents are at first comfortable, then downwardly-mobile, then – because they live in the pre-war, then-Polish town of Lwow – they find themselves trapped in a nightmare at the outbreak of the Second World War, where they have to contend with the Soviet army invading from the East and the Nazis coming in from the West. Jumping to the 1970s, Huelle takes us into his childhood home, where his father – an engineer like the grandfather – struggles to make ends meet on his poor salary during Communism but for a period delights his family by reviving a clapped-out Mercedes so that they can go on excursions together. The family unit and with it the preciousness of the car as a means to liberty then wither away as we enter Huelle’s adult world, where his individualistic existence as a writer, coupled with the gridlock throttling the city (Gdansk), rob driving of much of its appeal. It is significant in these passages that Huelle and Miss Ciwle speak as if sealed within the vehicle and are less preoccupied than his forbears with the places it is taking them to.

But the book is a very pleasant ride nonetheless and it is to Huelle’s eternal credit that he has gone some way to rescuing the car – that scourge of the environment and kids crossing the road – from a reputation careering toward a tragic end to one where it wins much of its humanity back.