On The Road To Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe - Hardcover

Stasiuk, Andrzej

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151012717 ISBN 13: 9780151012718

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2011

Synopsis

Andrzej Stasiuk is a restless and indefatigable traveler. His journeys take him from his native Poland to Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine. By car, train, bus, ferry. To small towns and villages with unfamiliar-sounding yet strangely evocative names. “The heart of my Europe,” Stasiuk tells us, “beats in Sokolow, Podlaski, and in Husi, not in Vienna.” 

Where did Moldova end and Transylvania begin, he wonders as he is being driven at breakneck speed in an ancient Audi—loose wires hanging from the dashboard—by a driver in shorts and bare feet, a cross swinging on his chest. In Comrat, a funeral procession moves slowly down the main street, the open coffin on a pickup truck, an old woman dressed in black brushing away the flies above the face of the deceased. On to Soroca, a baroque-Byzantine-Tatar-Turkish encampment, to meet Gypsies. And all the way to Babadag, between the Baltic Coast and the Black Sea, where Stasiuk sees his first minaret, “simple and severe, a pencil pointed at the sky.” 

A brilliant tour of Europe’s dark underside—travel writing at its very best.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Andrzej Stasiuk is a restless and indefatigable traveler. His journeys take him from his native Poland to Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine. By car, train, bus, ferry. To small towns and villages with unfamiliar-sounding yet strangely evocative names. “The heart of my Europe,” Stasiuk tells us, “beats in Sokolów Podlaski, and in Husi, not in Vienna.”

Stasiuk’s journey is through the dark side of Europe’s moon—the flip side that lies behind the tourists’ favorite destinations, and reveals a very different and more sharply etched Old World. Where did Moldova end and Transylvania begin, he wonders, as he is being driven at breakneck speed in an ancient Audi—loose wires hanging from the dashboard—by a driver in shorts and bare feet, a cross swinging on his chest. As one funeral procession moves slowly down a main street, with an open coffin on a pickup truck, an old woman dressed in black brushes away the flies above the face of the deceased. From Byzantine-Tatar-Turkish encampments to Gypsy mansions, from Byzantine churches to the first minaret between the Baltic Coast and the Black Sea, “simple and severe, a pencil pointed at the sky,” Stasiuk’s journey brings to life a strange world just beyond the edge of the familiar. This is travel writing at its very best.

From the Back Cover:

PRAISE FOR NINE:

"An accomplished stylist with an eye for telling detail . . . I caught a flavor of Hamsun, Sartre, Genet, and Kafka in Stasiuk’s scalpel-like but evocative writing." —Irvine Welsh, New York Times Book Review

"Stasiuk takes us into parts of Polish and post-Communist life whose day-to-day realities we might not have otherwise imagined." —Eva Hoffman, New York Review of Books

"A kaleidoscopic view of Warsaw in transition and in chaos, following the collapse of Communism . . . The technique is masterly, and the carefully calibrated atmosphere of dread and threat beautifully sustained." —Kirkus Reviews

"A sobering vision of the new face of central Europe in a narrative that is at once hallucinatory, haunting, and abject." —Publishers Weekly (starred)

"Nine stinks like cheap cigarettes and tastes like a busted lip but is tenderly observant and elegantly translated." —Booklist

About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0151012717
• ISBN 13: 9780151012718
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272