On the Road to Babadag
Travels in the Other Europe
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Journey through Poland, Ukraine, Slovenia, and other places neglected by tourists, with “an accomplished stylist with an eye for telling detail” (Irvine Welsh).
Andrzej Stasiuk is a restless and indefatigable traveler. By car, train, bus, and ferry, he goes from his native Poland to Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine—to small towns and villages with strangely evocative names. “The heart of my Europe,” he tells us, “beats in Sokolów Podlaski and in Huși. It does not beat in Vienna.”
In Comrat, a funeral procession moves slowly down the main street, the open coffin on a pickup truck, an old woman dressed in black brushing away the flies above the face of the deceased. In Soroca, he locates a baroque-Byzantine-Tatar-Turkish encampment, to meet Gypsies. And all the way to Babadag, between the Baltic Coast and the Black Sea, Stasiuk indulges his curiosity and his love for the forgotten places and people of Europe.
“There isn’t quite a name for the region that holds the Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk in thrall. The general drift is from ‘the land of King Ubu to the land of Count Dracula’, Poland to Romania. . . . Its nucleus is the landlocked centre of Central Europe; its protoplasm spreads like an amoeba through the Balkans. It cannot be convincingly mapped. . . . As travel writing, this is unconventional, but as literature profoundly authentic.” —The Independent (UK)
“A mesmerizing, not-to-be-missed trek through a little-visited region of the world.” —Kirkus Reviews
“A eulogy for the old Europe, the Europe both in and out of time, the Europe now lost in the folds of the map.” —The Guardian (UK)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this poetic travel memoir, Stasiuk (winner of the 2005 Nike Award, Poland's most prestigious literary prize) transports readers across Eastern Europe from Poland to Ukraine, Moldova, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Albania, and Romania. Past and present are intertwined as Stasiuk paints verbal snapshots of his travels in a style that is simultaneously detailed and abstract: "Sometimes I get up before sunrise to watch the way the dark thins out and objects slowly reveal themselves, the trees, the rest of the landscape The light of dawn, cold and blue, gradually fills the world, and it's the same in every place I've been. The dark pales into the district of Sekowa, in the town of Sulina, on the edge of the Danube Delta - and everywhere time is made of night and day." Traveling via bus, train, and car, Stasiuk pens his impressions of small towns and villages while collecting 167 passport stamps in seven years. He reports on violent events, such as extortion, from border guards and fights between teenage skinheads, with little emotion. His calm and steady voice invites readers to settle down comfortably for virtual travels.