The Absence of Love
FITELSON, DAVID
The Absence of Love The Eighth Day of the Week. By Marek Hlasko. Dutton. 128 pp. $2.75. Reviewed by David Fitelson Contributor, "Partisan Review'' At one point in this short, fierce novel of...
...Nobody in the book has any hopes, values, or dreams, except in moments of intense self-delusion...
...What it has to say about the life it portrays-that is, about its raw materials-is of considerable interest not just as fiction...
...He spends the larger part of the four days drinking up a good deal of vodka while waiting for the improbable return of his mistress who has gone back to her husband and children...
...The father, a petty bureaucrat, is waiting for the arrival of Sunday, the last of the four days, when he will be able to go fishing...
...and the inability of the author, as artist, to completely get out from under the weight of his material does not by any means impair the accuracy of his vision...
...And when will this day arrive...
...The mother, hopelessly ill, is apparently waiting for an end to pain...
...It may be that The Eighth Day of the Week was written largely in protest against this supposed state of affairs...
...Some of the characters know this, others do not...
...for it is certainly a book about love and it certainly abjures glorification...
...Actually, there is nothing in any case...
...There are occasional stylistic lapses, but in general the writing is charged with a kind of staccato brilliance which achieves-among other things-compression of an amazing density of action, emotion, and ideas...
...The answer, apparently, is Never...
...Also, the book, being written in an intense and passionate idiom, brings very meaty substance to its ideas...
...And therefore, merely for one to go on, to continue to live each successive day a little differently from the day before-just this-is a form of affirmation...
...Reviewed by David Fitelson Contributor, "Partisan Review'' At one point in this short, fierce novel of contemporary Poland, the brother of the heroine (a term used loosely here) observes: "So far, at least, all love literature is nothing but glorified crap...
...The principal thread of the narrative concerns the unsuccessful efforts of Agnieszka, a student, and Pietrek (of whom we know only that he has been a political prisoner) to obtain quarters-an apartment, a room any thing with four walls-in which to consummate their love with some amount of dignity...
...Unfortunately, in evaluating the novel, one has to say that the brilliance is misplaced, or rather that it is self-defeating, dramatically...
...In the last analysis, the book is not seriously marred by its imperfections...
...but one suspects that it is a problem which presented itself to the author, who one way or another seems to have abdicated responsibility for its solution...
...Any old four walls, since they symbolize the civilized way of doing things_will have more dignity than would nature's facilities which Agnieszka declines, providing the novel with its opening words...
...This is actually a rather encouraging form of nihilism, if it is that at all...
...but the fact that the reader is given very little help in ordering the experience to which he is subjected does indicate the absence of a certain amount of necessary form or focus in the book...
...The fact that the reader is not permitted to be a self-possessed spectator to what goes on in the book, that what goes on is instead forced upon him -this is not at all a bad thing...
...If this is nihilism, it is a peculiar and variant form, because the characters deny not only all hopes, values and dreams, but their alternatives as well...
...but even those who know it deny it...
...It is the story of four days in the lives of a few not very exceptional inhabitants of a Polish city...
...Then here is Zawadsky a mechanic who boards with the family and whose time is spent mainly trying to repair the motorcycle which will enable him to visit-and eventually marry-his fiancee...
...Everyone must believe that the eighth day will come, for otherwise there is nothing...
...Their effort con of Pietrek's to make them a night's loan This apartment...
...What everyone is waiting for is a day in the future, the eighth day of the week...
...Finally, there are the parents of Agnieszka and Grzgorz...
...The problem facing the reader-that of juggling the novel's multifarious elements, and of finally working them into place-is not an insoluble one...
...To be dissatisfied with the absence of values is to believe implicitly in the value of values...
...whether or not they are impossibilities and lies, Hlasko seems to say, man needs values in order to live...
...And so we find that love-which is portrayed alternately throughout the novel as an obscenity, a sapper of strength and a destroyer of life-is also, simultaneously, that quality whose absence is primarily responsible tor the misery in the lives of the father and mother, and whose presence is the motive force that keeps Agnieszka, Pietrek, Grzgorz and Zawadsky going...
...Thus despair and hopelessness are themselves considered to be as devoid of utility and meaning, and as untenable, as are those rejected cameos: God The Family The State Freedom, etc...
...Only slightly less prominent in the book are the activities of Agnieszka's brother, Grzgorz, a sometime tavern philosopher and recently deposed Party member...
...It is almost as though one had been presented with the raw materials for an unquestionably great work of fiction and been told to put them together oneself (this may not be so far away) ; and the job is a difficult one without plans...
Vol. 41 • November 1958 • No. 41
