The Mighty Angel

April 1, 2009
Winner of Poland's prestigious NIKE Literary Award, and the second of this important Polish writer's works to be translated into English.

"Doctor, I'm aware, I really am fully aware, that it's impossible…to live a long and happy life when you drink. But how can you live a long and happy life if you don't drink?" With this line—uttered upon the occasion of his 18th trip to rehab—Pilch's narrator offers a perfect summary of the alcoholic's paradoxical existence. The Mighty Angel of the title is both the pub where this eloquent antihero—like his creator, a writer named Jerzy—escapes sobriety and the fiery messenger from the Book of Revelations. As he tells his story, mingled with those of his fellow inmates in rehab, Jerzy captures both the ecstasies and ugly despair of inebriation. The novel, which offers no excuses, is as funny and charming as it is gruesome and tragic. In addition to being an alcoholic, Jerzy is addicted to words. This interferes with his ability to lead a fully engaged life as much as his fondness for peach vodka does. Translator Johnston deserves credit, too, for the precise rendering.

A candid, caustic, intensely human depiction of alcoholism.

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May 15, 2009
"How can the loftiest flights of the soul ever be equated with a fearful barfing?" Good question, one of many posed by our narrator in this novel of a writer coming out of his 18th stint in rehab. He begins unabashedly"Yes indeed, I had been drinking peach vodka, brutishly longing for one last love before death, and immersed up to my ears in a life of dissolution." Polish novelist Pilch ("His Current Woman") slyly weaves together a large-cast story of the wages of intoxication. Like many verbose drunks, the narrator is not without wry insights and mocking self-awareness; he likens the rehab center to a creative writing program. The analogy is apt since the novel's language mixes a bemusing sort of grandstanding amid formidable words like "farinaceous, divigations, forfend", and "horripilates". The center may remind one of Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", while the character names (Moses Alias I Alcohol, Don Juan the Rib, and the Hero of Socialist Labor) recall Thomas Pynchon. A quick read, spellbinding as a raised glass.Travis Fristoe, Alachua Cty. Lib. Dist., FL

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