Description
Book SynopsisSitting by her window with a glass of cranberries in sugar syrup bought from a woman in the market who assured her they came from Karelia, she muses “Perhaps they have some other kind of effect when you eat them. Spiritual maybe? So I eat and wait for the Karelian cranberries to work their magic on me.” Skarynkina is impelled to spend the last of her money on a trip to Krakow to meet Czeslaw Milosz but never finds his address, so he remains to her an idol like Elvis Presley dressed in gold lame. Each story has a charm and imaginative flight of its own.
Trade Review‘She writes as if penning a letter to a close friend, loosely, intimately, but never less engagingly…’
-- Alan Taylor * The Herald *
Country Life wrote of Skarynkina’s essays that they ‘exist at the very edge of what we can imagine.’
* Country Life *
Table of ContentsNote on language Introduction by Maryja Martysievič Smarhoń the Magical Hugs Death and the Panama Hat The Real Brodsky My God! Angels on the Frontier The Silver Screen, an Old Church and a Cinema called `Cosmos’ On First Name Terms with Borges, Tolstoy and Nabokov Post Mortem Maryja and Japan Winter Camp Three Generations of Domestic Porcelain Figure Skates and Dead Classmates A Window on Another Life Talking about The Brothers Karamazov When Writers appear in Dreams Rabbit Meat, Gypsies and the Ocean Four Sisters and the Cornflower Blue Dress A Large Dose of Czesław Miłosz with a Dash of Elvis Presley The Restaurant that gave us a Foretaste of America Two Film Stars Pork Knuckle and Stuffed Camel Onegin and the Surgeon Time to have Your Hair Done Do you remember the Hypnotist? A Farewell to Pugachova The Face is not Right Greetings that waft from my Childhood Days Notes on the Text
