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arszania's review
3.0
A short story that displays an interesting dynamic among two Polish emigrants - an old conflict between Polish peasants and intellect.
When it comes to the plot, it is not particularly complicated - after all, it is a short story in which we concentrate on two men living in a small neglected room in an unidentified country in Europe. We meet two characters XX, who represents Polish working class - he is uneducated, emigrated due to financial reasons, and AA who belongs to the intelligence and left his country for political reasons, presumably fearing the oppressive government. The plot plays out over a course of a one day, during which we discover and interesting relationship between this two, at the first glance, completely different men.
The book touches on interesting topics like, commonly exploited in Polish literature emigration and connected with it alienation in a foreign country, problems with loneliness, wealth, freedom, and also class division.
While, I can see the importance of this themes, especially at the time it was written, the storytelling doesn't suit me. I found it tedious to read and think that it could have been presented a little better. However, this is only personal opinion and it is worth noting that generally I am not a great fan of books that skirt around some topics and thus my low grading. I would much prefer for it to be straightforward but at the same time I see how it could turn into technical and nonfictional book.
I couldn't understand some of the themes presented by the author and some situations were just too abstract, may not abstract it is a bad world but the plot was messy (understandable since we can see that he focused on the content).
All in all, I didn't particularly enjoyed reading the book, I don't think it was bad, however, it was just not my style, it was a little to far-fetched to my taste.
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