Not There

Mariusz Szczygieł is one of Europe’s most celebrated journalists. A reporter for Gazeta Wyborcza, he is the author of a number of books of reportage about the Czech Republic and Poland. His books are published in 21 countries and have been awarded the Europe Book Prize and the Prix Amphi, among other honours. Szczygieł runs the Institute of Reportage a creative writing reportage school, and Dowody na Istnienie, an independent publishing house.

Not There ultimately celebrates what endures: the stubborn glow of memory, the joy of small human continuities. In Szczygieł’s world, absence has its own heartbeat, one that reminds us that to write about what has disappeared is to affirm what is still present – the fragile, flickering persistence of being.”​ Frank Wynne, Irish TimesNot There, translated once again by Lloyd-Jones, is full of weird variety and bounce. We get stories of a woman hunting in a library for books from her childhood, saving one of them just in time from the library’s ruthless ‘clearance’ procedures: ‘You see, my dear,’ the librarian coos at the rescued novel, ‘You’ve escaped selection, you’re going to go on living.’​....Szczygiel takes pains to preserve tiny things for us: a snatch of dialogue overheard on the metro, or a conversation with a completely random stranger about the Czech national character.​... Czech history – which still seems to obsess Szczygiel – is told through the prism of a single poem, or the history of a Prague house, the Loos-designed Villa Müller – ‘a star among villas’ – through whose exquisite Modernist rooms and stairways history seems to rampage. ‘We never remember the whole, just details,’ he explains. ‘I’m sure the detail is where the whole of something is reflected.’​....‘So, here in this book,’ writes Szczygiel jauntily, ‘we’ve saved one postcard, perhaps more than just that.’ One can only agree with him: whole multitudes are saved in Not There from the ‘bomb of time’.​  Robin Ashenden, The Spectator“Not There is about ordinary people and the things that have happened to them, and it’s impossible for the reader not to share the emotions underlying the stories as they prompt us to think of our own losses, and our compensations. It’s also about how we remember things – unreliably on the whole – and how our idea of the truth may be a very personal one. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, translator