I Burn Paris

I Burn Paris has remained one of Poland’s most uncomfortable masterstrokes of literature since its initial and controversial publication in 1928. With its montage strategies reminiscent of early avant-garde cinema and fist-to-the-gut metaphors, the novel has lost none of its vitality and vigor. Ruthlessly dissecting various utopian fantasies, Jasieński is out to disorient, and he has a seemingly limitless ability to transform the Parisian landscape into the product of disease-addled minds, a debased world where factories and machines have replaced the human and economic relationships have prostituted just about everyone. In prose of striking immediacy, the modern metropolis is starkly depicted as only superficially cosmopolitan, as menacing and tribal at its core.



Unavailable in English until this translation, I Burn Paris is a major work of Central European modernism.