The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel
A Novel
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A story of love and adventure in an imaginary Slavic nation on the brink of historic change—the debut of a ribald and raucous new literary voice
Set in the quaint (though admittedly backward) fictional nation of Scalvusia in 1939, The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel follows the exploits of a young swineherd with romantic delusions of grandeur. Desperate to attract the voluptuous Roosha, the Gypsy concubine of the local boot-and-shoe magnate, Barnabas and his short-legged steed Wilhelm get embroiled in a series of scandals and misadventures, as every attempt at wooing ends in catastrophe. After the mysterious death of an important figure in the community, a witch-hunt ensues, and a stranger falls from the sky. Barnabas begins to see the terrible tide of history turning in his beloved hometown. The wonderfully eccentric supporting cast includes a priest driven mad by a fig tree, a gang of louts who taunt our reluctant hero at every turn, and a dim-witted vagabond with a goat for a wife. Even as her characters brush up against one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century, Magdalena Zyzak's humor and prose delight in the absurdities of the human animal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This first novel by a Polish-born writer now living in the U.S. is a wild, imaginative farce, a mix of folktale with magical realism, Dostoevsky conflated with Woody Allen, and it will infuriate as many readers as it delights. The Barnabas Pierkiel of the title is a farmer in the fictional Slavic country of Scalvusia in 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II. The narrator, "a self-effacing bureaucrat," tells Pierkiel's story and the story of Scalvusia which failed to survive the war in the form of a picaresque. The style is old-fashioned and formal, painted with a broad, almost surreal brush. Pierkiel is an antihero, an innocent, driven primarily by his daydreams and his lust for Roosha Papusha, a "gypsy" woman. He's surrounded by an immense cast of characters, most of whom have narrowly defined roles (such as "Kumashko the priest" and "Daria the spinster"). Zyzak is a clever writer, but it's hard to know what to make of the novel; it's not dramatic in any classic sense, and it treads on the edge of being insulting (her villagers come off as stereotypically provincial proles; one popular pastime, apparently, is "ramming bottle caps into each other's foreheads"). Perhaps the point is that no amount of knowingness or sophistication could prevent the destruction of Scalvusia, first by the Germans and then the Soviets, but there's something frustrating about the farcical tone.
