Mercedes-Benz

by Pawel Huelle, Radoslawa Janowska-Lascar (Translator), Mihaela Cornelia Fiscutean (Translator)

Overview

Mercedes-Benz este un roman captivant, comic si trist in acelasi timp, conceput sub forma unei lungi scrisori adresate scriitorului ceh Bohumil Hrabal, dar si un omagiu adus acestuia. Din perspectiva autobiografica, Pawel Huelle scrie o carte despre iubire, despre trecut si prezent, in care masinile - si in special Mercedesul bunicului - au un loc indispensabil formarii. Pawel Huelle spune povestea vietii a trei generatii de polonezi, incepand cu independenta de dinainte de razboaiele mondiale, trecand prin anii de comunism si ajungand la copilaria ce-l apropie de sfarsitul unui secol plin de momente istorice memorabile.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789734647248
Publisher:	Editura Polirom
Publication date:	06/19/2014
Series:	Literatura
Sold by:	PUBLISHDRIVE KFT
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB
Language:	Romanian

About the Author

Pawel Huelle was born in 1957. The author of Who Was David Weiser?, Huelle is a novelist, playwright and journalist who has lived most of his life in Gdansk. His novels, Mercedes-Benz and Castorp, translated into many languages, are also published by Serpent's Tail

Editorial Reviews

Playful postmodernism Central European-style-entertainment for a decidedly select demographic: automobile aficionados desperate for the inside skinny on Poland's recent past. Pawel knows what he likes: talking and driving, driving and talking. And that's about it for the feckless narrator of this brief ramble of a tale. Namesake of rising literary light and former Solidarity press officer Huelle (Moving House Stories, 1995, etc.), Pawel is a motor-mouth Mercedes maniac fixated on how that spiffy car factors in his family's legend. Himself a downscale prole in the early '90s, he's a student driver tooling around Gdansk in a tiny Fiat. In the midst of learning turn-signaling and parallel parking, he reminisces relentlessly about his dad and granddad. Talking the ear off his driving instructor, Miss Ciwle, a tomboy hottie, he then chronicles their conversations to send to his idol, Czech surrealist short-story writer Bohumil Hrabal. His yarns are decent-enough accounts of everyday people caught in the web of history-his grandfather weathering mustard-gas attacks as a gunner in the Royal Imperial Austro-Hungarian Army, his engineer father finding solace by tinkering with a decrepit Mercedes during the grim height of the hammer-and-sickle years. What's better are his off-the-cuff chats with Miss Ciwle's colleague, a martinet Pawel nicknames "Instructor Uglymug." Wheeling through crosstown traffic, he confides in Uglymug comically dreary stories of his time in military service, "where Major Bushy-Tache educated us about the disastrous effects of long hair on national security, Lieutenant Gewgaw responded to a nuclear attack, and Colonel Pitchfork cast light on the imponderabilia of Lenin's andBrezhnev's doctrines."Colorful setting and trenchant social commentary, but a cul-de-sac plot.

Kirkus Reviews