Review by New York Times Review
THE POLISH POET Adam Zagajewski's splendid new book of prose, "Slight Exaggeration," is constructed of untitled anecdotes, essays and meditations, some mere sentences long. Writing on art, family, war, ideas, ideology - pretty much whatever his mind settles on - Zagajewski is in fact always writing about displacement. Readers of his poems will recognize his preoccupation with Lvov, a city lost to his parents and their friends after Poland ceded it to the Soviet Ukraine after World War II. With it, they also lost culture, beauty and any sense of being at home. "It pains me to know I never lived there," Zagajewski writes, lauding "the city's hills and the many spires of its churches." He notes "the clean sky in May" and, in the next sentence, "the horror of war and occupation (but I didn't endure it, didn't see it)." This acknowledgment of Zagajewski's own displacement from displacement makes his longing much more than attractive nostalgia. "Slight Exaggeration," published in Polish in 2011 and fluidly translated by Clare Cavanagh, is delightful to read straight through as it riffs, zags and circles. But you could drop down anywhere in this sometimes diaristic, sometimes belle-lettristic book and find something interesting. On creative types: "Of all artists, painters strike me as the friendliest." On his antisocial Uncle Jozef's refusal to join the family's regular Sunday afternoon gatherings: "Jozef in his pajamas, surrounded by family members dressed normally, ... is like Poland under the partitions. A country that's lost its statehood, its autonomy, but hadn't completely vanished." That's a poet's leap from the anecdotal to the symbolic, but you probably couldn't do it in a poem, where it would seem too didactic and stagy. Zagajewski's father is a central figure here, and Zagajewski's portrait is loving: A "lonely man, fragile ... happiest in the mountains. We'd sit on a mountain meadow. ... He'd say nothing, just gaze in silence. ... At a certain moment, my father's calling ... became comforting my mother, the constant permanent, daily creation of an optimistic vision. ... Just air force exercises, he said, when bombs began to burst everywhere on Sept. X1939_Nothing to upset us. ... There won't be a war - these were my father's historic words, by which he granted his wife, my mother, an extra 15 minutes of peace. He prolonged the interwar era by a quarter of an hour especially for her." Zagajewski can seem anachronistically highbrow: "Poets who listen to pop music - their numbers are growing - don't seem to have ... mystical leanings." Once I unroll my eyes, I can see that Zagajewski is much attracted by "the ineffable," by which he means, I think, what can't be perceived entirely by the senses. He pokes fun at himself about this, or allows his father to. A journalist asks about an essay in which Zagajewski claimed settled people prefer painting while displaced people prefer music, "the most metaphorical of the arts" - metaphor being that which moves the literal toward the ineffable. "Slight exaggeration," says Zagajewski's father, an engineer - unwittingly giving name to this book. Zagajewski retorts: "A good definition of poetry ... a slight exaggeration, until we make ourselves at home in it. Then it becomes the truth. But when we leave it again - since permanent residence is impossible - it becomes once more a slight exaggeration." If Zagajewski's insistence on the highbrow - his conflation of ideas and taste, his highly confident pronouncements on aesthetic value - can seem a touch unbecoming, it's worth noting that to be discerning, to be intellectual, in the Eastern bloc during the Cold War, was to create space for independent mind and spirit - that is, to resist, survive and remain human. That's Zagajewski's heritage, and something we in America might give thought to just now. DAISY FRIED is the author of three books of poems, most recently "Women's Poetry: Poems and Advice."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 30, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
Poet Zagajewski (Unseen Hand, 2011) presents a book-length essay made up of entries diaristic and expository, aphoristic and prolix, autobiographical and biographical. Zagajewski is a humanist and a cultural conservative acutely concerned with exile the loss of place and home and formlessness the loss of forms that shaped the arts. His most interesting and moving sections concern poetry and poets. If Zagajewski propounded definitions, this book could serve as an ars poetica, but he is too circumspect, or perhaps wary, to define the art he has devoted his life to. Instead, he is generous to a fault toward authors he admires, including Simone Weil, E. M. Cioran, and George Seferis. It's clear he reads principal works as well as diaries and letters. If Zagajewski could be said to espouse his philosophy, he finds the most succinct statement of it in Paul Claudel: He who admires is never wrong. Given the times, this noble sentiment has extra resonance.--Autrey, Michael Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
It's hard to categorize Polish poet Zagajewski's (Unseen Hand) luminous book, perhaps best characterized as an extended meditation on life and art. No chapters or titles anchor readers, though there are breaks between sections. But despite the text's diffuse quality, distinct themes emerge. First, it's a meditation on displacement: shortly before the poet's post-WWII birth, the Soviets annexed the Polish city of Lvov and sent Zagajewski's family to Gliwice, a city recently transferred from German to Polish control. Throughout the book, he wanders frequently: to France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the U.S. Second, Zagajewski insists on the importance of history, a touchstone pulling him ever backward to WWII and the period immediately prior. Third, he insists on the particular rather than grand theory: "All systems are finally a mental poison, the rotten apples of the mind's life." Not until two-thirds of the way through does the title's meaning emerge: it's how Zagajewski's engineer father once summed up a passage of his son's poetry, and Zagajewski celebrates this phrase as a definition for poetry in general. This rich, insightful book has a depth that pulls the thoughtful reader in, and it offers the welcome perspective of an unabashed intellectual with a lifetime of experience to share. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This work by Polish poet and critic -Zagajewski (Without End) has a unique and mysterious style, made up of fragmented, brief stories quilted together in order to form a whole. These largely autobiographical fragments are either related or unrelated depending on which fragment was previously read. One can start this book on the first page and continue on to the end, letting the fragments congeal, or open the book randomly and read the passages in no particular order. Either way, the reader will encounter thoughts and experiences defined by composers, writers, daily happenings, and historical events. VERDICT For readers who enjoy autobiographical or philosophical accounts. Those who appreciate experimental writing will also find much to delight in. [See Prepub Alert, 10/31/16.]-Jeremy -Spencer, Univ. of California, Davis, Law Lib. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Reflections on art, music, poetry, and family from an acclaimed Polish poet.In an engaging assemblage of short essays, poems, and diary entries as brief as a sentence or two, Zagajewski (Unseen Hand: Poems, 2011, etc.) offers an impressionistic collection of thoughts about culture, history, and aesthetics, circling always back to his family's experiences during World War II, when they were forced to leave their native Lvov and resettle in Silesia. Uprootedness, he believes, is crucial to the creation of art. Stability may be enviable, he writes, "but it has no poetic merit whatsoever. Loss alone touches us deeply, permanence goes unremarked." Many pieces coalesce to form a tender portrait of his taciturn, modest father, an engineer and professor, who lost his memory to dementia. When asked once to comment about "the whole strange world that had swallowed up his son," he replied that poetry is a "slight exaggeration," because, as Zagajewski explains, a genre awash in metaphor, hyperbole, and emotion was antithetical to his objective, pragmatic view of the world; poetry "confuses the boundaries and lines of reality, which grows feverish and dances." The author himself defines poetry as "mysticism for beginners." Acutely responsive to place, Zagajewski recalls 20 years spent in Paris, a city that enthralled him, and many semesters teaching in Houston, where he discovered the riches of the Rice University library and Menil art collection. Other pieces, not surprisingly, consider language, writing, and a number of fellow poets, including Joseph Brodsky (a "brilliant, arrogant intellectual" and also "the most considerate of friends"), Constantine Cavafy ("the Balzac of modern Greek poetry"), Zbigniew Herbert, and Philip Larkin. Zagajewski dismisses the work of some young poets who, in his estimation, "did not know how to live." Among visual artists, the author admires the old masters; in music, he is transported by Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, and Billie Holiday, whose voice rendered him "spellbound." An illuminating prose album of candid musings on the "melancholy and joyful" gifts of art. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
