He talks about irrelevant bullshit

"I regard psychology as a pseudo science, and psychological profiling of criminals is just a nice name for what a clairvoyant does. If someone repeats ten times that he can see a body in the woods, he must be right three times out of ten — after all, one-third of this country is forest, and it's easier to bury a corpse there than along the highway."

"In that case, why are we meeting with the profiler?"

"He's a smart guy. Weird, but really smart. And he's read more files than you'll ever set your eyes on. He talks about irrelevant bullshit, as they all do, but sometimes he says a thing or two that make sense."

"A thing or two?" Falk was unable to hide his contempt.

Szacki didn't comment. Falk was right, in his way, but there were some things he'd only understand after fifteen years on the job. For example, that an investigation is like a jigsaw puzzle, a really tricky one, a seascape of ocean waves at night, with ten thousand pieces. At some point you have all those pieces lying on the table, but they're damned hard to connect. And that's when you need someone who can take a look at them and say, "Hey that's not the moon, just its reflection in the waves."

Rage, by Zygmunt Miłoszewski, is the third and likely final novel featuring Teodor Szacki as investigator. He's a deeply troubled guy. But also a deeply normal guy, who keeps fucking up in his personal life. And work, well, he doesn't always play by the rules. He fucks up big-time here.

I don't know why I find Szacki so sympathetic. Is it because he's good-looking and a snappy dresser? Is it something to do with his Polishness that I respond to? Do I on some level identify with him? This charismatic man in a midlife crisis is irresistible to me.

Rage is like sitting in traffic, simmering. In fact, several scenes led me to believe the novel would turn toward road rage, but instead it deals with domestic violence and vigilantism. Perhaps "outrage" would've been a more fitting title.

The case at the core of this novel is intriguing enough: what's taken for a decades-old skeleton found in a deserted bunker turns out to have been stripped of flesh just days beforehand. As plots go, it's a serviceable vehicle from which to watch Szacki's personal drama spiral out of control.

Someone is challenging Szacki to redraw the lines between law and justice, between personal and professional, between theoretical and lived experience. Rage colours everything.

[Quite coincidentally, over the last month I've been working on a large jigsaw puzzle of seascape under a blue sky. Sometimes I can't tell which way is up. There's a Polish boat in it.]

The light picks everything out of the void

Poland had, in its habitual way, once again ceased to exist.

If you know anything about Polish history, that line should make you laugh. Or maybe cry.

This is the great appeal for me of reading Polish fiction. It gathers me into its fold. I may not be an insider, but I'm not an outsider. It connects me to my history. Sometimes I learn a thing or two to buttress my Polishness.

Zygmunt Miłoszewski writes crime thrillers set in contemporary Poland. It is unabashedly "genre" fiction, and as such it captures common life in a way "literary" authors don't; Olga Tokarczuk, for example, may give voice to Poland's soul, but Miłoszewski conveys the noise of its hair and clothes. Similarly, when Louise Penny writes about Montreal, I feel the comfort of recognition; when I read Miłoszewski it fosters the familiarity with Poland I wish I had.

I'm not saying that's the case on every page, but it's what I want when I reach for Miłoszewski's books, and it's what I get in just the right dose.

If I'm a Pole, it's good for me to know that this is what the Polish character is:

The average American starts off by taking everything at face value. The average Pole is convinced from day one that everyone's trying to screw him, cheat him, stab him in the back, and declare war. As a result, they never let down their defenses, which is handy at the front, but a major obstacle when you're trying to conduct a secret operation right under their noses.

Priceless, by Zygmunt Miłoszewski, is a standalone thriller (a departure from his series featuring State Prosecutor Teodor Szacki) about an art heist (my favourite kind of thriller*). It's one of the greatest heists in history — countless masterpieces the Nazis stole from Poland during WWII. And evidence has surfaced attesting to the fact that Raphael's Portrait of a Young Man has been preserved.

According to the Economist, the Polish ministry of foreign affairs:

maintains an inventory of approximately 60,000 works of art, listed as stolen from Poland by Nazi forces during the second world war. And this figure could be only the tip of the iceberg. Immediately after the war, Polish authorities estimated that roughly half a million works of art had been stolen or destroyed. According to a recent article in Wprost, a weekly, the 124 most sought-after stolen Polish art pieces are worth somewhere in the region of $200m.

The article confirms the approach to negotiation for the return of artwork as explained in Priceless — Poland will not pay a grosz for it, in accordance with official government policy, as the paintings are the true property the Polish state. The art should no longer be hostage.

The novel's plot concerns the mission to recover the Raphael, but the team of experts uncovers a conspiracy to keep it hidden, which points to the much deeper conspiracy behind it concerning who pulled the strings of world power in the 1930s.

"Maybe I know history too well; sometimes too much knowledge is a a curse. Put it like this: If I had a time machine and could stand by Hitler's cradle, I'd say to his parents, 'Find him a good art teacher, otherwise he'll be unhappy and nasty.' But if I could stand by Himmler's cradle, I'd wait for his parents to leave the room and strangle the baby without batting an eye."

The characters are a lot of fun, all with great backstories. One of my favourites is old granny Olga, eyewitness to political shenanigans and wartime devastation, renowned for her amorous conquests. In her room hangs a movie poster for Tarkovsky's Solaris. It must be the same one I have on my wall, though hers is signed by Lem with a dedication.

Priceless is a well-paced, original thriller full of history, humour, and grace. And art.

"Painting is light. It's simple physics. The light picks everything out of the void, and reflects off everything in various ways, and that's what produces colors. Painting is an attempt to render that fleeting moment when an infinite number of rays of light reflect off the world and land in the eye."

Review.
Excerpt.

*I mean, who even buys stolen art? What do they do with it? And where can I get me some?

Painting is not thinking, it is the exterioration of thinking

"He began his 'From One to Infinity' project in 1965. In the top left corner of the first canvas, he painted the figure one, then two, then three. By the time he'd reached the bottom right corner he was at, I don't remember, somewhere around thirty thousand. And then he started the next canvas, painting several hundred figures a day like that for the next forty-five years. At first it might have been eccentricity, but after thirty-six years of daily, consistent, Sisyphean work, he'd produced the most brilliant expression of transience in the history of art. Or at least that's what I think."

"So do I," mumbled Lisa.

"Me too," said Zofia, raising a hand.

— from Priceless, by Zygmunt Miłoszewski.

Me too. I'd never heard of Roman Opałka till I read these pages in this thriller about recovering artworks stolen from Poland by Nazis. His career came later, of course, but this is why I enjoy reading Miłoszewski — the insights into both current and historical aspects of Polish culture.



Roman Opałka painted time, moving forward toward infinity. His life's work is a series of canvases, each of them a "Detail" of his magnum opus, 1–∞.

Listen to Opałka counting off.

See also:
Roman Opalka’s Numerical Destiny

He pursued this culmination on a daily basis, eight hours a day, until the process of painting led him to “white/white” — that is, white numbers on a canvas with a background painted white, the same as the numbers. After three years (1968, possibly 1969), Opalka began to add 1% white pigment to the black background. Gradually, over time, as more paintings were painted, the black surface would become gray. As he continued to count and to paint five, six, and seven digit numbers, he discreetly added 1% white to each canvas, thus making the surfaces appear increasingly lighter. In the late 1970s he declared that the background of his canvases would eventually appear white, the same white used to paint the numerals that would finally dissolve into the surface, embody the surface. Ultimately, there would be no distinction between the white numerals and the white surface; they would culminate as a form of blankness, possibly transcendent, as the numerals grew invisible within the prospect of infinity, the Samadhi or highest level of meditation.

[...] Opalka was clearly reaching for invisibility in his paintings.

Running the Numbers

A frequent misunderstanding about Opalka is that his engagement with painting was merely a convenience by which to execute the idea, and that the idea would be enacted over decades of time. In fact, painting was never ancillary; it was a central idea. For Opalka, there was no idea apart from the act of painting. This was his infinity. In this sense he could be evaluated as a dialectical painter as Hegel was understood as a dialectical philosopher. Opalka’s synthesis became an idea/painting, the result of a numerical destiny, the entire span of 233 Details at the end of his life, or, from a conceptual point of view: one vast singular epic given to a rarified existence.

Living among dirt and chaos

"I don't like the fact that eventually every conversation between Catholic Poles and Jews goes back to events from almost seventy years ago. As if there hadn't been seven hundred years shared history before that, and everything after it. Just a sea of dead bodies and nothing else."

A Grain of Truth, by Zygmunt Miłoszewski, is the second mystery novel featuring State Prosecutor Teodor Szacki. I stayed away from this novel for a few years precisely because I didn't want to read about that conversation.

But Miłoszewski handles it judiciously. Since World War II, and even before then, Polish-Jewish relations have been complicated and strained. The plot of this mystery hinges on those tensions, which persist today.

The murder has the characteristics of Jewish slaughter, and the story is linked to the myth of blood libel. As such, the prosecutor has to confront the anti-Semitic past of his adopted town, Sandomierz: xenophobia and violence and resurgent nationalism. The investigation delves into archives, symbols, and local legends.

A Grain of Truth also features a painting in Sandomierz cathedral, which for years was covered up with a cloth because it was considered offensive. Since the novel was written, the painting is again on display, but with an informative plaque. Here's the thing about owning your past.

Read the excellent review at NPR.

What I particularly like about these novels is the cultural touchstones Miłoszewski offers me: Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. Jacek Kaczmarski. Julian Tuwim.

I'm not even sure why I know those names. My mother doesn't know those names. It's just luck that my social and educational path at one time crossed the Poland Miłoszewski references. For this reason, I find these books highly relatable. Surely someone who has no Polish heritage would also enjoy these books, but maybe they wouldn't resonate in the same way.

Szacki's failed marriage and his general uncertainty about life (in any realm beyond his profession) also contribute to the feeling of relatability. He's just a regular, fucked-up guy.

I also like how he disses both small-town life and Warsaw. I never much liked either.

All those years living in Warsaw he'd sensed that something wasn't right, that the ugliest capital city in Europe wasn't a friendly place, and that his attachment to its grey stone walls was in actual fact a sort of neurotic dependence, urban Stockholm Syndrome. Just as prisoners become dependent on their prison, and husbands on their bad wives, so he believed that the very fact of living among dirt and chaos was enough for him to bestow affection on that dirt and chaos.

Excerpt.

Fatal whirlpools

I went looking for a fragment of one poem, but found something else entirely. And when it comes to poetry, it's usually just as well.

I'm reading a mystery novel by Zygmunt Miłoszewski. The text is liberally sprinkled with pop-cultural references along with some classical ones, a lot of them very, very Polish. When he quoted Wisława Szymborska, I went looking for the source.

Instead I found "In Praise of My Sister," which I've since been reading over and over, all while (silently) actually praising my sister (for entirely unrelated reasons).

There are many families in which nobody writes poems,
but once it starts up it's hard to quarantine.
Sometimes poetry cascades down through the generations,
creating fatal whirlpools where family love may founder.

My sister has tackled oral prose with some success.
but her entire written opus consists of postcards from vacations
whose text is only the same promise every year:
when she gets back, she'll have
so much
much
much to tell.

I love this poem.

It makes me wonder where poetry comes from. I don't think my sister ever wrote poetry; I'll have to ask her. To my knowledge, my parents weren't afflicted. But my brother was. He wrote on napkins and coasters and the insides of cigarette packages. Filled with mystical symbols and romantic angst. My attempts were more academically driven. (And far superior.) Have we opened the genetic floodgates? Pity my daughter.

But also I've been reading three different translations of this poem, and puzzling over them.

While in the fragment above (tr. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh) the sister has much to tell, Adam Czerniawski says "she'll tell us / all / all / all about it." and according to Magnus J Krynski and Robert A Maguire, "she'll tell us, everything, / everything / everything." They're none of them... perfect.

I wondered also about Peter Piper — I couldn't be sure how meaningful or not that reference was to me ("And, even though this is starting to sound as repetitive as Peter Piper," Barańczak & Cavanagh). The original Polish (see Pochwała siostry) names Adam Macedoński, an activist, artist, and (minor?) poet. One translation leaves the reference, obscure as it is, intact ("and though it sounds like a poem by Adam Macedoński," Krynski & Maguire); another evades the issue entirely ("And — this begins to sound like a found poem —" Czerniawski). And I still don't know who Adam Macedoński is, and what Peter Piper is supposed to mean.

Days like this I hate poetry, and I love it. I have too much time on my hands, and not enough.

Days like this I praise my sister for being an accountant.

Entangled in Poland

He tried smiling roguishly into the side mirror. What a tragedy. Like a German pretending to find Polish humour funny.

Entanglement, by Zygmunt Miłoszewski, has a lot going for it, starting with a wealthy corpse with a skewer through his eye in a repurposed monastery, journeying through quack psychiatry and marital infidelity, and ending in the archives of Poland's secret service.

Prosecutor Teodor Szacki is a solid protagonist. There's nothing spectacular about him — and I mean this as a compliment. No quirks, no special methods, no esoteric hobbies (not poetry or opera), no drinking problem; he's not a fuck-up, at least not in anything but a very average way. He dresses well, perhaps above his station ("a suit the colour of diluted silver").

His intuition occasionally comes into play — a niggling feeling that something's not right, not complete — but it never overshadows the real work, the research, exhausting all avenues. His problem: he's bored. Personally and professionally. So when he actually finds something interesting, it can drive him pretty far.

He reached his block and glanced up at the illuminated kitchen window on the second floor. He didn't feel like going home, so he sat on a bench in the courtyard to enjoy the June evening. It was already after nine, but it was still warm and light, and there was a smell of the city cooling down. At moments like these he felt like the nightingale in Julian Tuwim's poem, who upsets his wife coming home late for supper.

It's references like this that make me feel connected to my Polishness.

Warsaw is the backdrop. We visit its parks and cafes, and tour through its various districts. Contemporary Poland really comes alive in the chapter openings, where Miłoszewski runs down the day's headlines — it's 2005 — touching on local politics and including the weather report.

The story digs back into the days of Communism and the rule of General Jaruzelski, and the unpleasantness of those times follows Szacki into the present day.

I suppose most readers will view all these elements as "colour" to round out a good crime story. For me, the murder is an entry point to contemporary Polish culture and recent history.

See also the following reviews:
Petrona
Swiftly Tilting Planet

What would it be like to read Bulgakov for the first time now?

"I don't know if you have ever been in love. Really and truly. If you have, you're a lucky man, If not, I envy you like the devil, because you have the greatest adventure of your life ahead of you — perhaps. Do you know what I'm talking about? It's like with books. It was great to read The Master and Margarita at grammar school, but I'm green with envy to think there are adults who still have that ahead of them. I sometimes wonder: what would it be like to read Bulgakov for the first time now? Never mind. Anyway, if you want to reply: 'I don't know,' it means you haven't loved yet."

— from Entanglement, by Zygmunt Miłoszewski.

These are not new sentiments being expressed here, but I find this little monologue from a minor character in the final pages of this contemporary Polish crime novel odd for two reasons.

Odd thing number one: I love books. Sure, there are times I prefer the company of books to people. But I my love for books is not on the same scale as my love for my loved ones. These are entirely different orders of love; it would not occur to me to juxtapose them.

Odd thing number two: To read a beloved book again for the first time is a common enough wish. I've heard people wish this of Jane Eyre. Childhood classics, coming of age classics. Mind-bending SF classics. Simply it surprises me that the sentiment should be expressed regarding Bulgakov.

I read The Master and Margarita more than twenty years ago, loved it, but remember next to nothing about it. I've been planning to reread it — perhaps this year is the year — and in a different translation, it'll be as if I'm reading it for the first time. Won't it?

What would you like to read again for the first time?

If I had a completely different life

Łazienki Park

I wonder what it would be like, thought Szacki, if I were to park in the courtyard and go up to the flat on the second floor, and find that girl waiting for me? If I had a completely different life, different CDs, different books on the shelves, if I smelled a different body lying next net to me. We could go for a walk in Łazienki Park, I'd tell her why I had to be at work today — let's say at an architectural studio; she'd say I was brave and that she'd buy me an ice cream near the Theatre on the Island. Everything would be different.

How unfair it is that we only have one life, mused Szacki, and that it so quickly bores us.

— from Entanglement, by Zygmunt Miłoszewski.

This book is interesting to me on two main counts: 1. The victim (this being a crime novel) was engaged in Family Constellation Therapy, which is a real thing and a terrifically weird thing. 2. It's very rich from a cultural perspective — life in contemporary Poland — with mentions of everything from the Green Day concert in Katowice to the commemorative stamp issued to honour ski jumper Adam Małysz ("the Polish Batman").