Waking one Warsaw morning to thoughts of death and the end of the world, Tadeusz Konwicki receives a series of visitors: a drunken official notifies him that his water will be cut off for maintenance, a plumber arrives to turn off his gas in the wake of a recent gas-leak explosion at another building, and two friends from the dissident literati stop in to notify him that he's been selected as the best candidate to self-immolate on the steps of the party headquarters that night (enough name-recognition to cause a stir, but no great cultural loss). And so, unsure of what he actually intends to do, Konwicki sets off on bleakly absurd odyssey across an uncertain Poland (probably late 70s when this was written, but the Party has been withholding and obfuscating the calendar for years, so who can tell? Are the seasons off or is the weather really turning to apocalyptic chaos?) -- an uncertain Poland filled with destruction and disorder, bitter tirades and black humor. The set pieces are often surreal but not entirely improbable: a shoddy art opening for a retired high Party rep, an interrogation punctuated by the sounds of the restaurant bathrooms through the wall. Even narrator-Konwicki may not escape the contempt of author-Konwicki, who presents him as something of a lech and whiner, a vestigial organ of the pre-Soviet days who has become increasingly useless and irrelevant to his times. And when he struggles to find some advice to leave future generations after his projected death, he can only come up with advice on dandruff and constipation and cheating at card games. Amusingly, despite the obsolescence of narrator-Konwicki, author-Konwicki wrote this -- his best-remembered work -- directed two more films, and continued to outlive his times. To this day, in fact. He's still with us.

I already loved Konwicki, but had started with his less-known works. Finally, his foremost novel confirms all those good feelings. Harsh, hilarious, surreal, dystopian, at moments totally haunting.

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Previous note on how-the-hell-did-you-get-away-with-this: I mean, I know that pre-Solidarity 1979 Poland was pretty much in free-fall, but how on earth did Konwicki manage to covertly publish this excoriating portrait of that free-fall and still be allowed to carry on and even make another movie almost immediately? There's nothing disguising the sheer bitterness about the state of Poland, here, no attempt to allegorize or otherwise obscure his contempt for the government (soviet and domestic), the people, even his fellow dissident artists. Or maybe the fact that he attacks almost everything around him, not just the state, was a kind of buffer? Either way, it's incredibly bold.