Confidential
A Novel
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book
The darkly comic tale of three generations of a Jewish family, from one of Poland’s most renowned contemporary authors
“A novel sparing only in words and form, not in emotion.”
—Vogue (Poland)
Confidential follows on the success of acclaimed photographer, psychologist, and writer Mikołaj Grynberg’s highly acclaimed short story collection, I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To, which was a finalist for numerous awards, including Poland’s most prestigious literary prize, the Nike, a National Jewish Book Award, the Sami Rohr Prize, and the National Translation Award in Prose for Sean Gasper Bye’s translation.
This powerful new novella is a darkly comic portrait of a Jewish family in today’s Poland, struggling to express their love for one another in the face of a past that cannot and will not be forgotten. The grandfather is a doctor, a Holocaust survivor who has now vowed to live only for pleasure. His son, born at the start of the war, becomes a well-respected physicist, but finds himself emotionally unable to attend conferences in Germany, despite the benefit it would give his career. The mother is loving but firm, though she has a secret habit of attending strangers’ funerals so that she can cry.
A masterpiece of concision, Confidential expands on one of the stories in I’d Like to Say Sorry . . . , tackling themes of memory, trauma, and care, as well as enduring anti-Semitism, with unforgettable power, emotional complexity, and Grynberg’s trademark black humor.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Grynberg expands on a short story from his collection, I'd Like to Say Sorry, but There's No One to Say Sorry To, for this deeply humane portrait of a Polish Jewish family in the decades after WWII. In episodic chapters, Grynberg pieces together the stories of his vulnerable and quick-witted characters as they struggle to move past their grief. Grandpa, a doctor, lives solely for pleasure and has sex with other women while married to Grandma, who met him when she worked as an accountant, and who eventually develops Alzheimer's. Their son, Father, is born during the war and raised in a Jewish ghetto. Later, he becomes a respected physicist, though by the early 1990s he alienates himself from the European science community by refusing to attend conferences in Germany, ostensibly due to his "experiences in the war," as a colleague unsatisfyingly puts it for him. He has two sons with Mom, a loving yet sorrowful woman who grew up in orphanages while her parents were detained in concentration camps (only her mother survived). The boys also carry the weight of their ancestors' grief, which follows them as they grow up and raise their own families. Grynberg deploys wry humor in his keen depictions of parent-child and spousal relationships ("Let's agree that once he dies, we'll stop visiting," Father says to Mom about Grandpa). This powerful novel is not to be missed.
