Nike Literary Award (Nagroda Literacka 'Nike')
Things I Didn't Throw Out
Rzeczy, których nie wyrzuciłem, translated into English as Things I Didn't Throw Out, is an essayistic memoir built around the books and objects left by the author's late mother. Through unsentimental fragments, it brings into focus loss, memory, language, and everyday life in postwar Poland.
Work Information
From the things that could not be thrown away, a mother's voice and an era take shape.
Marcin Wicha's Nike Award-winning book follows a narrator sorting through his mother's books, clothes, small possessions, and remembered phrases after her death. The brief chapters echo the tactile process of clearing a home, using family memory to illuminate the life of a postwar generation.
Review Summaries
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The restrained narration is valued for linking personal and social history through the details of a mother's belongings. Humor and pain coexist, keeping the book from becoming merely sentimental grief writing.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Daunt Books
- Published
- 2021-10-14
- Pages
- 208 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 18.69 x 1.12 x 19.81 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781914198021
- ISBN-10
- 1914198026
- Price
- 2474 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/History/Europe/Poland
Amazon配送商品ならThings I Didn't Throw Outが通常配送無料。更にAmazonならポイント還元本が多数。Wicha, Marcin, Dziurosz, Marta作品ほか、お急ぎ便対象商品は当日お届けも可能。
Reviews
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Disclaimer: I am friends with the translator. In this funny and moving memoir, the Polish author Marcin Wicha tells the story of his mother's life through the objects she left behind when she died. I loved the chapters that focused on the books Joanna accumulated - the covers, spines, and titles that catalogued Poland from the post-war years to the 1990s: "The nineties were the realm of the adverb 'how'. After the fall of communism, everything became possible. The problems catalogued in dusty tomes finally had a cure. The solutions were ready. You only had to know how." Joanna jumps off the page in all her spiky, formidable complexity, and I really appreciated the fascinating insight into what it was like for her, a Jewish woman in Poland, in the decades after the Second World War. Marta Dziurosz's translation (which won a Society of Authors Translation Prize) is engaging, witty and easy to read. I particularly liked the way she picked British English words and phrases that perfectly capture a sentiment, e.g. jammy sod