Fado by Andrzej Stasiuk; trans. by Bill Johnston

In Fado, Andrzej Stasiuk ambles through his experiences living and traveling through the countries of Central Europe. This collection of essays is both a travelogue and a memoir, with some history and philosophical musings mixed in. In Hungary, Slovakia, Albania, Romania, and his native Poland, Stasiuk writes about how past and present coexist in ways that modernity has erased from many other parts of the world, while capturing his love of the constant discovering and remembering entailed in traveling through places both familiar and new.

“Best of all is night in a foreign country,” the author writes. Stasiuk is a well-worn traveler, one who knows what he’s talking about when it comes to Central Europe. The intimacy he feels with the places of his book, as well as how much he loves traveling itself, is evident from the beginning. For him, “To travel is to live. Or in any case to live doubly, triply, multiple times.” The author has lived in the Carpathian Mountains for the last 17 years and has done a great deal of traveling through parts known and unknown. His experiences there, and his narrative talent, enable him to illustrate with a particular clarity the characteristics of Central Europe.

At his best when elucidating the confusion of time particular to the region, throughout these essays Stasiuk dwells on the idea of the past as present. Early on, he writes of gypsies in Romania, “They’d taken a shortcut here from the depths of times long gone, and they felt perfectly comfortable in the present.” Gypsies are a constant in the region, and for Stasiuk they are an ever-present reminder of a past that has stubbornly continued to exist. This is not an awkward anachronism however, rather this quality of time is integral to life in this part of the world. He writes, “When all is said and done, it’s only that which has passed that truly exists, and at least partially corroborates our uncertain Central European existence.”

I was drawn to the book and recognized so much in it as true because I went to Romania for the first time this summer. With my father and my younger brother, I rented a car and drove through Transylvania from Bucharest. Time seemed to have collapsed in on itself in a way I had never seen before, and in a way that Stasiuk writes of so well. On the road, there were spans of time where we passed more horse drawn carriages than cars. We drove through one-road villages, where, if it were not for some of the clothing and the very rare car, it could have been any time in the last two hundred years. Occasionally we passed signs of failed industry, factories and plants built under the Communists that have since fallen into semi-use and disrepair, vague reminders of what was and could have been, but is not.

“That is Romania,” Stasiuk writes.

A country taken aback by its own existence. On the highways there are the latest Mercedes and Range Rovers, while on the roadsides old women walk along carrying baskets on straps like backpacks, and over their shoulders are wooden rakes and pitchforks whose shapes haven’t changed in hundreds of years. Both the Range Rovers and the wooden pitchforks are completely real, because Romanian time is so ingeniously constructed that the notion of anachronism has no application here. Everything happens at the same time.

Our author intertwines these descriptions with his own life, creating a memoir running parallel with the travelogue. Memory is very important to him, especially how it relates to what is real and what is imagined about the past, present, and future. In the essay titled “Memory,” he writes, “The future is a big vacuum. It contains nothing, and can excite only science fiction fans, Marxists, capitalists, or aging spinsters. Only that which is past exists, because it possesses its own form; it’s palpable, tangible, and in a certain sense it saves us from madness, from mental annihilation.”

The absurd is also an important element in the book. In the essay “Poetics and Slaughter”, he writes of a 2005 conference in Belgrade held in honor of the Serbian writer Danilo Kiš, who passed away in 1989. The title of the organization behind the conference alone seems unreal—the Center for Cultural Decontamination.

In an empty hall a group of writers sat at a table, read texts about Danilo Kiš, and spoke of the significance his work held for them. The public sat on chairs in the hall. There were no more than twenty people. The whole event was watched over by the police. On the plane white walls there was an exhibition of photographs from Srebrenica. For example, long rows of identical coffins covered in green cloth. Or pits filled with a tangle of decomposing human bodies. That was why the police were guarding us. So that nothing bad would happen to us or the exhibition.

As our author explains, the famous “Srebrenica tape” had surfaced the week before, and thus the whole city was feeling testy. It was a graphic video showing Serbian paramilitary police executing six Muslim men. Hence why, “a handful of writers and a handful of spectators were being protected by the police.” And yet, at the end of the conference when it came time to eat and drink, “the policemen mingled with the novelists, poets, and essayists, and everyone discreetly sipped a glass of wine or beer together.”

Stasiuk has written an extremely thoughtful and at times introspective collection of essays, one that pulls the reader along through a land absurd in ways beyond the persistence and accepted intermingling of past and present. He displays the particularities of a region of the world rarely explored and worthy of discovery. If people cannot travel to these lands themselves, reading Fado is an excellent literary substitute.

Reviewed by Lauren Goldenberg

Fado by Andrzej Stasiuk; trans. by Bill Johnston
Dalkey Archive Press, 2009
Paper, 136 pp, $13.95
ISBN-13: 9781564785596