On the Road to Babadag
Travels in the Other Europe
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Andrzej Stasiuk is a restless and indefatigable traveller. His journeys - by car, train, bus, ferry - take him from his native Poland to small towns and villages with unfamiliar yet evocative names in Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova and Ukraine. Here is an unfamiliar Europe, grappling with the remnants of the Communist era and the arrival of capitalism and globalisation.
'Where did Moldova end and Transylvania begin,' he wonders, as he is being driven at breakneck speed in a hundred-year-old Audi - loose wires hanging from the dashboard - by a driver in shorts and bare feet, a cross swinging on his chest. And so his journey continues all the way to Babadag, near the shore of the Black Sea, where he sees his first minaret.
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.
