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Jump to navigationJump to searchLala by Jacek Dehnel and Antonia Lloyd-Jones (translator) (view source)
Revision as of 15:27, 8 March 2018
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''This is the mysterious nature of storytelling: the same start can also mean different endings, and different starts can lead to the same finale. It's all subordinate to the greater narrative, which starts somewhere in Kiev,''. This beautiful book is exactly that, the mysterious art of storytelling. The wayward meanderings of memory, of tangents and digressions, of side notes and elaborations, but above all that of affection; for both the story and the storyteller. What makes us who we are if not our culture and heritage and in this book our narrator re-lives and re-tells the story of his heritage told to him by his grandmother.
To describe the plot of this book is difficult; it's like trying to hold water, and that is the wonder of this book. The story is really a great string of memories; of Jacek Dehnel's own memories of his grandmother and his memories of the stories she told of a great cast of characters, family members, neighbours, even Madzia-who-brings-the-milk. These stories of memories pick up and drop off, fly off at tangents, both our narrators and his grandmothers, so as a reader it is hard to hold a specific sense of who, where and when. Instead, the reader is left with a glorious sense of impressions, a sense of who people are rather than what people did. Added to that, the memories are told by Dehnel with a great sense of humour and affection for both the stories he is telling and for his elderly grandmother Lala. This book won the Paszport Polityki Award and it is not hard to see why.
