Lucifer Unemployed

by Aleksander Wat, Lillian Vallee (Translator), Czeslaw Milosz (Foreword by)

Overview

In these nine stories the Polish writer Aleksander Wat consistently turns history on its ear in comic reversals reverberating with futurist rhythms and the gently mocking humor of despair. Wat inverts the conventions of religion, politics, and culture to fantastic effect, illuminating the anarchic conditions of existence in interwar Europe.

The title story finds a superbly ironic Lucifer wandering the Europe of the late 1920s in search of a mission: what impact can a devil have in a godless time? What is his sorcery in a society far more diablical than the devil himself? Too idealistic for a world full of modern cruelties, the unemployable Lucifer finally finds the only means of guaranteed immortality. In "The Eternally Wandering Jew," steady Jewish conversion to Christianity results in Nathan the Talmudist reigning as Pope Urban IX. The hilarious satire on power, "Kings in Exile," unfolds with the dethroned monarchs of Europe meeting to found their own republic in an uninhabited island in the Indian Ocean.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810108400
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	02/01/1990
Edition description:	Translated
Pages:	123
Sales rank:	325,095
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

ALEKSANDER WAT (1900-1967) was a Polish poet, writer and art theoretician, one of the precursors of Polish futurism movement in early 1920s.

CZESLAW MILOSZ received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1980.

LILLIAN VALLEE is the translator of the three-volume Diary of Witold Gombrowicz.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Czesłas Miłosz
The Eternally Wandering Jew
Kings in Exile
The History of the Last Revolution in England
Has Anyone Seen Pigeon Street?
April Fool 
Hermaphrodite
Long Live Europe!
Tom Bill, Heavyweight Champion
Lucifer Unemployed

What People are Saying About This

Stanislaw Baranczak

One of the most original, fascinating, and curious figures in twentieth-century Polish literature, Wat left behind an oeuvre which is salient, artistically accomplished, and influential...with its shifting narrative perceptive, wild imagination combining the trivial and the fantastic, and highly "subjective" lyrical style [Lucifer Unemployed] is a unique and important contribution to the twentieth-century evolution of the short story and to fiction in general.

Editorial Reviews

"Wat . . . was a central figure in Polish modernism and this—his 1927 book of speculative stories—comes as a revelation. . . . The style is quick, syncopated, and piquant (excellently rendered by Vallee), with Wat capable of richer tones as well. . . . Wat's stories [indicate] the special nature of the Mitteleuropisch Expressionism that flourished—however briefly—in a literature we still know so little about."

—Kirkus Reviews


"One of the most original, fascinating, and curious figures in twentieth-century Polish literature, Wat left behind an oeuvre which is salient, artistically accomplished, and influential . . . with its shifting narrative perspectives, wild imagination combining the trivial and the fantastic, and highly 'subjective' lyrical style, [Lucifer Unemployed] is a unique and important contribution to the twentieth-century evolution of the short story and fiction and general."

—Stanislaw Baranczak

From the Publisher

These nine stories, originally published in Poland in 1927, will introduce American readers to the fresh, biting political and social fictive manipulations of Wat, who died in 1967. Marked by prose that is dense, even labyrinthine, as well as somewhat overblown in its archness, the collection serves as a crucible where the line between reality and fantasy is repeatedly obliterated. Wat fancies a Catholic Church whose priests and pope of Jewish descent persecute the anti-Semites/anti-Catholics; the latter group, headed by John Ford of the automobile dynasty, have converted to Judaism. Elsewhere, in the wake of WW I, a new island surfaces in the Indian Ocean and becomes a home for dethroned monarchs; these rulers of civilization degenerate into barbarians. A man searches for a street that never existed, and a member of a theater audience impulsively joins the play. An unemployed devil, who finds he is superfluous in the inferno of atheistic modern times, becomes a film artist: Charlie Chaplin. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly