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ogd's review against another edition
5.0
My favorite travel memoir. Central and Southeastern Europe, wine, cigarettes, dust, train stations, old trucks, forgotten history and the soul of the writer beautifully woven together in an impressionistic narrative.
annabarbarabittner's review against another edition
2.0
Jadąc do Babadag okazała się być kolejną w tym miesiącu książką, której forma zupełnie nie jest kompatybilna z moją percepcją. W zasadzie miała wszystkie cechy lektury idealnej - podróże, wyprawy, przemyślenia im towarzyszące, stare fotografie. Tym bardziej cieszyłam się, że wreszcie ją przeczytam. Tymczasem jednak zupełnie nie nadaję na tych samych falach co Stasiuk.
Autor przemierza kraje, powiedzmy Europy Wschodniej. Porusza się, dość losowo po Słowacji, Węgrzech, Rumunii, Mołdawii, Bałkanach. Wsiada w przypadkowe pociągi i obserwuje. Absorbuje wszystkimi zmysłami, rozmawia, doświadcza. Niestety towarzyszące temu rozważania mnie nużyły. Stasiuk doświadcza odwiedzane kraje jako szare, zatrzymane w czasie, pełne marazmu, bezruchu. I taka jest jego proza. Stagnacja, rezygnacja, nuda. Przyznam, że ostatnie 50-60 stron już tylko przekartkowałam, bo nie byłam w stanie zmusić się do dalszej lektury.
Autor przemierza kraje, powiedzmy Europy Wschodniej. Porusza się, dość losowo po Słowacji, Węgrzech, Rumunii, Mołdawii, Bałkanach. Wsiada w przypadkowe pociągi i obserwuje. Absorbuje wszystkimi zmysłami, rozmawia, doświadcza. Niestety towarzyszące temu rozważania mnie nużyły. Stasiuk doświadcza odwiedzane kraje jako szare, zatrzymane w czasie, pełne marazmu, bezruchu. I taka jest jego proza. Stagnacja, rezygnacja, nuda. Przyznam, że ostatnie 50-60 stron już tylko przekartkowałam, bo nie byłam w stanie zmusić się do dalszej lektury.
leic01's review against another edition
4.0
I really don't know how to rate this book. Some parts are insanely delightful and poetic (this man can write a sentence!) but in other parts, my mind drifted away during some unnecessary ongoing descriptions (don't know if that is due to my lack of focus and concentration, I did work a lot these days). But parts that were good, were so original and amazing that this book deserves a high rating after all.
I don’t usually read travel journals, but due to the current situation, I wanted an armchair journey. The author travels through Eastern Europe, but he does not go to capitals, big, well-known cities. In his journey, he explores small and nearly abandoned places, with few or no people, and I adored that his traveling is really non-commercial and unique. He takes local people to drive him and guide him through their country. I was always more interested in that kind of traveling through the wilderness and rural areas than visiting big cities. Sometimes when I drive past these kinds of places, I imagine what kind of life people live there. This book provides that answer, as a lot of scenes of everyday life or ordinary people are described. There is also something interesting that the author does in describing the panorama. He doesn’t just describe a material landscape, he tries to portray the soul of the whole country. He paints a picture in which you learn about lands' historical context, psychological characteristics of people who live or lived there, politics (especially interesting due to the fact many countries where communist countries in near history), mixing mythology and philosophy with his inner dialogue. Those were the best parts for me when the author was going deep in the inner state of consciousness and explored how different landscapes and countries affect his state of mind. That is something that really interests me - a connection between external and internal and how one affects the other. I think there is a lot more to be said about that - author himself said that he has to travel due to the inner restlessness. I think that people sometimes gravitate to traveling in pursuit of a deeper exploration of outer but also the inner world. Physical travel can compensate for the psychological journey, or as this book showed, one can be parallel to other.
When I think more deeply about this, this author is fascinating (as is his life, I suggest you read about it) and I love the way his mind works in giving verbal structure to pictures of lands mixed with his own stream of consciousness. I have a feeling he is a type of person that looks at everything in search of the deeper layer beneath the surface. I will check out his fiction work for sure.
If you are interested in travel journeys, the never-seen face of Eastern Europe, and a very original way of using language, this book is for you.
I don’t usually read travel journals, but due to the current situation, I wanted an armchair journey. The author travels through Eastern Europe, but he does not go to capitals, big, well-known cities. In his journey, he explores small and nearly abandoned places, with few or no people, and I adored that his traveling is really non-commercial and unique. He takes local people to drive him and guide him through their country. I was always more interested in that kind of traveling through the wilderness and rural areas than visiting big cities. Sometimes when I drive past these kinds of places, I imagine what kind of life people live there. This book provides that answer, as a lot of scenes of everyday life or ordinary people are described. There is also something interesting that the author does in describing the panorama. He doesn’t just describe a material landscape, he tries to portray the soul of the whole country. He paints a picture in which you learn about lands' historical context, psychological characteristics of people who live or lived there, politics (especially interesting due to the fact many countries where communist countries in near history), mixing mythology and philosophy with his inner dialogue. Those were the best parts for me when the author was going deep in the inner state of consciousness and explored how different landscapes and countries affect his state of mind. That is something that really interests me - a connection between external and internal and how one affects the other. I think there is a lot more to be said about that - author himself said that he has to travel due to the inner restlessness. I think that people sometimes gravitate to traveling in pursuit of a deeper exploration of outer but also the inner world. Physical travel can compensate for the psychological journey, or as this book showed, one can be parallel to other.
When I think more deeply about this, this author is fascinating (as is his life, I suggest you read about it) and I love the way his mind works in giving verbal structure to pictures of lands mixed with his own stream of consciousness. I have a feeling he is a type of person that looks at everything in search of the deeper layer beneath the surface. I will check out his fiction work for sure.
If you are interested in travel journeys, the never-seen face of Eastern Europe, and a very original way of using language, this book is for you.
kingkong's review against another edition
4.0
Cool anecdotes about random people and things in Eastern Europe
left_coast_justin's review
2.0
Two stars: Not completely without merit, but poorer than average books of this type.
The late David Rakoff once described the lobby of his super-chic Parisian hotel as filled with "beautiful people of both sexes draped bonelessly over the furniture." This phrase came back to me while reading Babadag, because this struck me as a travel memoir cast bonelessly over the pages. (Babodag, by the way, is a small town in Romania hard up against the Black Sea. In his book, it had no particular significance -- I guess he just liked the name.)
I gave it a fair shot. For the first hundred pages or so, I was just confused. Stasiuk seemed to be engaged in an interesting experiment: What if all the normal structural elements of a travel memoir were simply stripped out? --Elements such as why the author decided to make the trip, placing the trip in a certain time period and following a coherent itinerary, and occasionally checking in to make some sort of broader point about the differences or similarities between the place being explored and home.
So instead, we get something like astronaut.io. For those of you unfamiliar with this, Google has website in which they randomly pull some of the millions of videos uploaded each week and stream them to the astronaut.io website. The only criteria are that the video needs to be less than a week old and viewed by fewer than eight people so far. This means you get a series of very personal videos -- lots of kids playing sports, wedding videos, lectures on soybean production, people dancing goofily and the like. There is no plot, no progression towards a goal, simply a collection of what individuals around the world found interesting enough to upload that week.
After a while, I started to understand Stasius' technique -- bit by bit, like dabs of paint on an enormous canvas, an overall portrait of life in Eastern Europe starts to emerge. It is a land in which hard liquor is a not-uncommon breakfast accoutrement. It is easy to lose control of your vehicle when sliding over slicks of cow shit. Smoking is an essential social activity. Older folks bemoan the loss of dictatorships.
Stasius himself describes his approach this way:
And a few pages later:
I was willing to play along, but this book went on and on and on and on, completely formless. What caused me to drop it to a two-star review was the final twenty percent, in which he felt compelled to share his philosophy. Or at least, fill about 100 pages of incoherent babbling of the "dreams are more real than reality" type, or "places are not real until I see them" variety. I have no patience for this sort of nonsense, expecially when presented as a first draft with no attempts to tighten it up or make it in any way coherent.
The late David Rakoff once described the lobby of his super-chic Parisian hotel as filled with "beautiful people of both sexes draped bonelessly over the furniture." This phrase came back to me while reading Babadag, because this struck me as a travel memoir cast bonelessly over the pages. (Babodag, by the way, is a small town in Romania hard up against the Black Sea. In his book, it had no particular significance -- I guess he just liked the name.)
I gave it a fair shot. For the first hundred pages or so, I was just confused. Stasiuk seemed to be engaged in an interesting experiment: What if all the normal structural elements of a travel memoir were simply stripped out? --Elements such as why the author decided to make the trip, placing the trip in a certain time period and following a coherent itinerary, and occasionally checking in to make some sort of broader point about the differences or similarities between the place being explored and home.
So instead, we get something like astronaut.io. For those of you unfamiliar with this, Google has website in which they randomly pull some of the millions of videos uploaded each week and stream them to the astronaut.io website. The only criteria are that the video needs to be less than a week old and viewed by fewer than eight people so far. This means you get a series of very personal videos -- lots of kids playing sports, wedding videos, lectures on soybean production, people dancing goofily and the like. There is no plot, no progression towards a goal, simply a collection of what individuals around the world found interesting enough to upload that week.
After a while, I started to understand Stasius' technique -- bit by bit, like dabs of paint on an enormous canvas, an overall portrait of life in Eastern Europe starts to emerge. It is a land in which hard liquor is a not-uncommon breakfast accoutrement. It is easy to lose control of your vehicle when sliding over slicks of cow shit. Smoking is an essential social activity. Older folks bemoan the loss of dictatorships.
Stasius himself describes his approach this way:
With events that have passed there is no problem, provided we don't attempt to be wiser than they are, provided we don't use them to further our own ends. If we let them be, they turn into a marvelous solution, a magical acid that dissolves time and space, eats calendars and atlases, and turns the coordinates of action into sweet nothingness. What is the meaning of the riddle? What is the use to anyone of chronology, sister of death?
And a few pages later:
So I repeat my hopeless mantra of names and landscapes, because space dies more slowly than I do and assumes an aspect of immortality. I mutter my geographic prayer, my topographic Hail Marys, chant my litany of the map, to make this carnival of wonders, this Ferris wheel, this kaleidoscope, freeze, stop for a second, with me at the center.
I was willing to play along, but this book went on and on and on and on, completely formless. What caused me to drop it to a two-star review was the final twenty percent, in which he felt compelled to share his philosophy. Or at least, fill about 100 pages of incoherent babbling of the "dreams are more real than reality" type, or "places are not real until I see them" variety. I have no patience for this sort of nonsense, expecially when presented as a first draft with no attempts to tighten it up or make it in any way coherent.
kathleenitpdx's review
5.0
This is a treasure--impressionistic, haunting journeys in the land between the Baltic, Adriatic and Black Seas-Slovakia, Moldavo, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary--towns with names in three languages or more--mountains, plains and corn fields--pubs, border crossings, buses, trains and ferries. Stasiuk seeks the edges, the eternal of his Europe.
"It gives me no rest, my wish to know the fate of all these scenes that entered my eyes and have remained in my thoughts. What happens to them when I am no longer there?"
Beautiful! but read with the internet at hand for this westerner that grew up with area behind the "iron curtain" and mostly ignorant of its geography, history and culture.
"It gives me no rest, my wish to know the fate of all these scenes that entered my eyes and have remained in my thoughts. What happens to them when I am no longer there?"
Beautiful! but read with the internet at hand for this westerner that grew up with area behind the "iron curtain" and mostly ignorant of its geography, history and culture.
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