Antoni LiberaReviews

A very strange story about a teenage boy’s obsession with his French teacher. Set in Soviet run Poland of the 1960s and 1970s. I am not sure why I picked this up but I read it all the way through. If you come across it I’d just keep on walking if I was you.

Antoni Libera creates a young man as the narrator of Madame. We meet him at school where his smart and dazzling French teacher is the infatuation of many of the young men. The Polish teenager is no exception and he sets himself the task to find out as much as he can about Madame. This experience takes him to many cultural events and gives him a glimpse of the adult world and changes him. Madame remains enigmatic throughout the novel with occasional sparks of humanity. When the narrative moves forward this is a charming and well-told novel of a young man coming of age in Communist era Poland but I found much of the high art that he describes inaccessible. We are given a young man who is clearly well read and intellectual and even precocious and I can see why these passages were perhaps necessary to paint this picture but they made the book somewhat saturated with words. The novel is an excellent insight into life in Poland in the 1960s, 70s and 80s and the difficulties faced by authors and academics who want to pursue their subject.½

In this exceptionally good novel Libera uses the infatuation of a precocious schoolboy with his French teacher to contrast the drab and corrupt culture of postwar Poland with the sparkle of French literary and artistic society.

"Madame's" background intertwines with different aspects of wartime and postwar Polish experience producing a remarkable account that is mostly unknown to Western readers (but could explain a lot of present day Poland), and as a bonus, and perhaps on a more superficial level, the story is an emotional roller coaster of a game with a great dénouement.

A Polish "The Graduate," this story takes place in the time of Communist Poland. The narrator is a precocious student, well-versed in French and literature, and the tale of his relationship with his French teacher and headmistress of the high school he attends. I found it fascinating and have already put it on my "re-read sometime" bucket list. The author has translated Samuel Beckett's works into Polish. The quibble with the book might be that the narrator's brilliance is not believable. I might agree, but was willing to make that leap of faith much like one must be willing to do in reading a thriller. It's my Polish friend (she is a former literature teacher in Poland) favorite book, and I can understand why.

The best fictional book I've read in 2008 so far by a distance...

A growing up novel of an 18-year-old young intellectual in Poland in the late 60s, I couldn’t put down. Or, to be accurate, I put it down only to read Victory by Conrad, to which the book referred so much that I had to read it before I went on. I most heartily recommend it. It is a fast, intelligent and witty story of a boy who falls in love with his beautiful and secretive French professor, and doesn’t hesitate to explore all the venues to get closer to her. The story is a pretext to explore the life in communist Poland of those times with all its quirks and Soviet bloc idiosyncrasies.

The best book I ever read, I own it in Polish, recommend it in English to all my friends who want to learn more about me and my world.