My First Suicide

Starred review from March 19, 2012
With his latest, Pilch (A Thousand Peaceful Cities) masterfully negotiates sentiment with a clear-eyed vision of his autobiographical narrator’s shortcomings and disappointments, suggesting a Dubliners set in Krakow. Ten sections that walk a precarious line between short story and chapter chronicle the disappointments of the modern urban man. Many of them deal with thwarted plans, such as when Piotr, a moderately famous writer, recollects his first suicide attempt from a distance of 40 years. Balancing the innocent insight of his 12-year-old self with the awareness of the present, he recounts his decision to jump from his parents’ apartment. In a later section, Piotr meets a moderately famous model. “When great love comes along,” he notes after fumbling his come-on, “a person always thinks he has fallen in love with the most beautiful woman in the world. But when a person has fallen in love with the most beautiful woman in the world, he can have problems”; as this section and others demonstrate, the problems are often different from what one expects. When Piotr tells the model that he’s working on a “collection of short stories of a different sort,” she ridicules the notion. Pilch’s readers will feel quite differently.

Starred review from May 1, 2012
A set of loosely concatenated stories that don't quite add up to a novel but are nonetheless rich in character and in the exploration of contemporary urban life in Poland. In the title story a man reminisces about a time 40 years before, when at the age of 12 he first had the impulse to take his life. He's heard from Pastor Kalinowski (one of the recurring characters) about the "other world" and has some curiosity about the passage from This World to That. The possibility of his own self-destruction curiously liberates the narrator, so he gives himself permission to violate some taboos--like watch an adult film and read a forbidden book he's found at the bottom of a cupboard. Pilch manages to inject a great deal of humor into the story--as well as tragedy, for it's also about the narrator's relationship to his drunken and dissolute father. "The Most Beautiful Woman in the World" announces its subject grandly, though the narrator is forced to admit she might only be in the top ten--or the top 100. He's nevertheless pleased to have found her, though his sexual fantasies about her turn out to be at one and the same time both indulged in and quashed. In "The Double of Tolstoy's Son-in-Law," the narrator develops an obsession about an old photograph of Tolstoy playing chess, while in "A Chapter about a Figure Sitting Motionless" the obsession is with Anka Chow Chow, a virginal soccer fan who has a weakness, or perhaps a fetish, for girls with backpacks. It's hard to do justice to the outre and eccentric, but gorgeous quality of Pilch's prose. Here he manages to pull off some neat literary tricks, frequently and self-consciously undermining the seriousness of his subjects with pricks of irony.

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July 1, 2012

The ten novellas that this work comprises, each much more than a short story, give readers a window into the world of a contemporary Polish man who reveals different episodes of his life with nostalgia and wit. As the narrator says, "suddenly I feel like the writer who, finally, after a long silence, has composed a phrase that is not only beautiful, but also thoroughly true." Family members are so well described that they come alive, from the mother who cleams incessantly and communicates with the dead in "A Corpse with Folded Wings," to the grandfather with a mania for keeping the five wind-up clocks in the house running. Aside from family, the novellas deal with misplaced love and allegiance. For instance, a student seeks out a disastrous relationship in "The Most Beautiful Woman in the World." In another story, the narrator schemes to romp with an amorous soccer fan and her female amour. VERDICT With his apt depictions and cleverl language, NIKE Literary Award winner Pilch will maker readers smile as they, too, gaze at the woman in the "lizard-green dress," and he effectively explores themes from the vagaries of Lutheran theology to the always pervasive topic of beautiful women.--Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH

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