The Pole Tadeusz Dabrowski turns 40 this year – with 20 years of publishing experience, he is one of the most experienced and best poets of his generation. It is surprising at first glance that he is now presenting his first novel: “Defense Line” would mean the title translated from Polish, “One Love in New York” was made by the German publisher.
–
Original metaphors and philosophical depth
At first glance, that sounds as if you have two target groups clearly in your sights: fans of love stories as well as fans of New York. But this book is also recommended for those who feel at home in Berlin, Lisbon or Kraków, who appreciate existential humor as well as meditations on the attraction of gender relations.
–
Dabrowski has managed to do something incredibly rare: a short, big-city novel, a dense, atmospheric description of New York from a European perspective, yet free of clichés. And the captivating depiction of an amour fou, beyond kitsch, surprising, romantic. The author brilliantly succeeds in telling the old story of “two meet” with strong images, original metaphors and philosophical depth.
–
A love over the distance of thousands of kilometers
Tad, an elderly Polish poet on a grant in New York, is sitting in the subway car on his way to a reading. “The wagon rocked like a drunk teen having sex.” As he ponders the best way to recite his poetry, he is approached by his seat neighbor, Megan, a young, somewhat jaded Canadian who is doing her PhD in architecture. He notices her eyelids opening “at a slow pace like Austin’s pop-up headlights,” her bare heels “the size of hen’s eggs,” the “white down-covered delta of her spine” (her neck!), her long hair “in the color of noodles”. Her whole “body architecture” seems to him like “one big invitation to an ambitious international project.”
–
On Megan’s tip, Tad goes to a Richard Serra exhibition, and she reciprocates by attending his reading. After that, at the latest, you will have an inkling of what it is all leading to. But Dabrowski creates suspense by letting Tad talk retrospectively from dreary Gdansk about where he ended up again after his scholarship expired. The poet cannot shake off his love even over the distance of thousands of kilometers. She’s breathing down his neck, he has her in mind and tries to banish what’s occupying him by writing.
–
A story with an existential dimension
The more the reader learns about the course of the love story, the more unclear it becomes whether it is fiction or an autobiographical project. Whether Megan was actually the great enchanting enigma or is literary projection. The confusion is intentional. Right at the beginning, the author sketches the image of a cartoon hero racing towards a waterfall with a tree trunk. “What if the hero himself is all in one – log, waterfall, river?”
–
This indicates the existential dimension of the story, of which nothing is lost, even if Dabrowski breaks it with irony and a post-modern narrative structure. Love as a game, as an adventure and an expression of liveliness, against all odds, strangeness and reason – that is “One Love in New York”.
–
Tadeusz Dabrowski: “Love in New York”
Translated from the Polish by Renate Schmidgall
Schöffling Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2019
144 pages, 18 euros
–
–
–
–
