Snow White and Russian Red
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
The international bestselling novel of nihilistic youth in post-Communist Poland: “chaotic and brilliantly idiosyncratic…destined to become a cult classic” (Library Journal, starred review).
When his girlfriend Magda dumps him, Andrzej “Nails’ Robakoski’s life begins to unravel. A track-suited slacker, Nails spends most of his time doing little more than searching for his next girl, next line of speed, next proof for his conspiracy theories about the Polish economy. A xenophobic campaign against the Russian black market is escalating across Poland, culminating in No Russkies Day–or is that just in Nails’s fevered mind?
A “punishing successor to first-person ‘lad’ novels like Trainspotting,” Snow White and Russian Red “serves up its nastiness spiked with pitch-black humor.” By turns poetic, hilarious, disturbing, and dirty, it is a powerful portrait of love, hopelessness, and political burnout in today’s Eastern Europe (Publishers Weekly).
"Critics have compared it to novels like Naked Lunch…Celine and Kosinski also come to mind."—John Leonard, Harper's
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A hit in 21-year-old Maslowska's native Poland and elsewhere in Europe, this punishing successor to first-person "lad" novels like Trainspotting serves up its nastiness spiked with pitch-black humor. Young, paranoid Polish speed fiend Andrzej "Nails" Robakoski presents himself, in hyperbolic stream-of-speech, as an ignoble chump morbidly obsessed with death whose trampy blonde girlfriend Magda has just dumped him. Living at home with a working but absent mother and felonious "bro," Nails adheres to a busy schedule of snorting lines, scarfing "Bird Milkies" (or chocolate-covered marshmallows), text-messaging and denouncing both American consumerism and Russian bootlegged goods. After Magda, Nails mindlessly nationalist, misogynist, homophobic, racist and anti-Semitic turns to anorexic virgin Angela, a Goth girl in black whom he feeds drugs and sexually assaults. Eventually, Nails is incarcerated for stealing a soda and walkie-talkie from a local McDonald's. In a hokey metafictional twist, he encounters "Dorota Maslowska," a teenage writer working as a typist at the jail, and then, after a collision with a prison wall, enters a hallucinatory state not much different from his waking life and from which the rest of the novel emerges. Paloff's translation is pitch-perfectly speedy, and with political ironies resounding throughout, it's clear that Maslowska is not exactly endorsing her blank generation, though the claustrophobic narrative presents few avenues of escape.
