ABSTRACT
Stasiuk's book relates car and hitchhiking trips through the most obscure and impoverished regions of southern Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Ukraine, Moldavia, Slovenia, Romania, and Albania. In an age when tourists crowd into spotless museums, this Polish-styled On the Road describes what only a few hardy voyageurs wish, and dare, to see up close. Stasiuk offers the most vivid, precise, and philosophically resonant descriptions of ugliness, depravity, decrepitness, and in the middle of nowhereness that the author ever read. The Jewish community has revived a little in recent years; its activities are concentrated around the White Stork Synagogue on the outskirts of the Old Town. Otherwise, this city that also deeply experienced the Reformation, beginning in 1523, is now pervaded by Catholicism. All along, the writer strives to give sense and shape to what the modern Pole, in this historically, culturally, linguistically, and ethnically tumultuous region, has experienced directly or indirectly.
