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WORK TITLE: Children of Our Age
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Bakalar, Asia
BIRTHDATE: 3/3/1975
WEBSITE: http://ambakalar.com/
CITY: London
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: Polish
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born March 3, 1975, in Wroclaw, Poland; immigrated to England, 2004.
EDUCATION:University of Wroclaw, Poland, B.A., M.A.; Birkbeck College, University of London and University of Southampton, graduate studies.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, and short story writer. Has appeared on BBC Radio 3 Night Waves and Proms Plus Literary, and BBC Radio 4.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals and websites, including the Guardian, the International New York Times, Wasafiri, Words Without Borders, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Also contributor to BBC Radio. Served as editor of Litro magazine’s Polish Issue. Short story “Woman of Your Dreams” was broadcast on BBC Radio 4, September 2015.
SIDELIGHTS
Born in Poland, A.M. Bakalar, born Zgadzaj, moved to Great Britain when she was about thirty years old. She studied English literature in Poland and then did doctoral work in England in postcolonial studies and comparative literature. Bakalar wrote the draft of her debut novel while studying for her Ph.D. She also writes short stories and contributes to periodicals and websites.
Madame Mephisto
In her debut novel, Madame Mephisto, Bakalar tells the story of Magda Rodziewicz, a Polish immigrant living in London who grows who grows and sells cannabis. Operating out of London, Magda, who narrates her own story as she tells it to an unnamed relative at a funeral, is extremely successful at drug dealing. Beautiful, with a charismatic personality, Magda relates what it is like to be a Polish immigrant living in the United Kingdom. Like many women, she is looking to meet the right guy so they can get married and have children. Magda, however, is not a wide innocent but carries a heavy dose of cynicism, including the prospect of living happily ever after in family life. Her mother annoys her, family lunch at Christmas is boring, she dislikes the Catholic church, and she deems the people she works with in various jobs untrustworthy and not interesting.
Magda’s real job, however, is the marijuana drug trade. She sees this work as helping save the lives of her clients, which range from actors and traders to a novelist and corrupt police. Magda also vents about her homeland Poland, a country she sees as a swamp of racism and hypocrisy that includes politics and religion. Magda is also not very kind in her comments about Polish immigrants, even though she is one herself.
Madga’s pronouncements about Poland and Polish immigrants led to many of Bakalar’s fellow Poles sending her critical emails, feeling that Bakalar showed a lack of respect for the home country. In an article she wrote for the Bookanista website, Bakalar noted: “One lady, who frankly admitted she had not read my novel but only heard about it, expressed her deep disappointment with the fact that I, an educated Pole, aware of my home country’s tragic history, chose to disrespect my own nation.” Bakalar went on to note in the same Bookanista article: “It never occurred to me that writing a novel about Polish traffickers could somehow fuel the negative image of Poles in Britain.”
Despite receiving criticism from some of her fellow Poles, Bakalar garnered praise from reviewers for the novel itself. “Madame Mephisto touches on the worlds of international crime, corporate culture, globalization and immigration and deftly manages to explore what has and hasn’t changed in Polish social mores since the end of communism,” wrote a Literalab website contributor. Elsbeth Lindner, writing for the Bookoxygen website, commented: “What’s most striking about the book is its vigour and the curious charisma of Magda herself.”
Children of Our Age
In her next novel, Children of Our Age, Bakalar writes about Polish immigrants, the pursuit of their dreams, and what they are willing to do to make sure those dreams come true. In her article for the Bookanista website, Bakalar revealed that the idea for the book came to her after learning about a Pole who had been trafficked to Great Britain by other Poles only to have his passport taken. The traffickers then used the man’s identity to get benefits in the man’s name. Meanwhile, the man, unable to speak English, ended up destitute for a time until he was finally rescued off the streets.
“I could not shake this story from my mind,” Bakalar wrote in the Bookanista article. Already 90,000 words into a new novel that was not about Polish immigrants, Bakalar decided she could not ignore the story and began work on Children of Our Age. Bakalar was confounded that Poles were taking advantage of other Poles. However, she also wrote in the Bookanista article: “I could not help but admire their business acumen, their energy to tap into the new system, their adaptability to the new culture.”
Children of Our Age revolves around several Polish immigrants. Karol Sosnowski and his wife, Milena, are well respected in London’s Polish community. Milena is a hard-edged business person. Karol, however, is a human trafficker who takes advantage of his fellow Poles in an elaborate scheme that also involves the brothers Damian and Igor Kulesz, who act as enforcers but dream about returning to Poland. Angelika and her husband, Mateusz, are naïvely optimistic about their future, while their daughter, Karolina, seems to be distancing herself from her family and her heritage. As the novel progresses, these characters lives’ entwine, ending up in disaster for some.
“The easy—and perhaps lazier—option would have been to tell the story strictly from the victim’s standpoint, thus garnering instant sympathy from the reader,” wrote Los Angeles Review of Books website contributor Mary Rogers, adding: “Instead, the author gives us a firsthand look into the minds of the perpetrators of evil, a decision that proves as mesmerizing as it is uncomfortable.” A Publishers Weekly contributor noted: “Captivating phrasing … enhances the skillful storytelling.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, January 29, 2018, review of Children of Our Age, p. 171.
World Literature Today, May-June, 2018, review of Children of Our Age, p. 63.
ONLINE
A.M. Bakalar Website, http://ambakalar.com (July 7, 2018).
Bookanista, http://bookanista.com/ (July 7, 2018), A.M. Bakalar, “Us and Them.”
Bookoxygen, http://bookoxygen.com/ (July 7, 2018), Elsbeth Lindner, review of Madame Mephisto.
Boundless, https://unbound.com/boundless/ (July 7, 2018), author contributor profile.
Guardian Online (London, England), https://www.theguardian.com/ (July 24, 2012), “Guardian First Book Award Reader Nominations: Madame Mephisto by A.M. Bakalar.”
Literalab, https://literalab.com/ (July 27, 2012), review of Madame Mephisto.
Literati, https://jimenagorraez.wordpress.com/ (April 14, 2012), review of Madame Mephisto.
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (January 17, 2018), Mary Rodgers, “The Chains of the Past: On A.M. Bakalar’s Children of Our Age.
A. M. Bakalar
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A. M. Bakalar (born 3 March 1975, birth name: Joanna Zgadzaj[1]) is a Polish author, writing in English. Her novels are Madame Mephisto (2012) and Children of Our Age (2017).
Contents [hide]
1
Early life
2
Career
3
Books
4
References
5
External links
Early life[edit]
Bakalar was born in Wroclaw, Poland. She studied at the University of Wroclaw, Poland, from which she graduated with a BA and MA in English Literature. In 2004 she emigrated to the UK. Between 2007 and 2011 she was a PhD student of postcolonial studies and comparative literature at Birkbeck College, University of London and University of Southampton. Bakalar wrote the draft of her first novel during her PhD studies.
Career[edit]
Bakalar’s opinion pieces, stories and book reviews have appeared in The Guardian,[2] The New York Times,[3] the Los Angeles Review of Books,[4] Boundless Magazine,[5] Words Without Borders,[6] Wasafiri,[7] BBC Radio 4,[8] and elsewhere.[9] She was the guest editor of Litro Poland Issue.[10]
Her first book, a novel Madame Mephisto, was published in April 2012.[11] The novel was well received by the critics. In The Times Literary Supplement, Max Liu noted “Bakalar…captures how isolating London can be for newcomers,”[12] while Lucy Popescu, writing in the Huffington Post called it “a darkly-comic account of a Polish immigrant’s experiences in London.”[13] The book was a reader nomination for the 2012 Guardian First Book Award.[14]
Her second novel, Children of Our Age, published in October 2017,[15] is an exploration of modern-day human trafficking by Poles living in the UK. The novel received a starred review in Publishers Weekly which called it “enthralling”[16] and praised it “skillful storytelling.”[17] Mary Rodgers, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, called it an “unflinching yet ultimately compassionate second novel”[18] and “an ambitious work of great scope and power.”[19] In the Times Literary Supplement, Ania Ready noted “A novel about the power of language to estrange and, occasionally, connect.”[20]
She lives in London, UK.
Books[edit]
Madame Mephisto (2012), ISBN 978-0957132603
Children of Our Age (2017), ISBN 978-0993377334
A. M. Bakalar’s first novel Madame Mephisto (Stork Press, 2012) was a reader nomination for the 2012 Guardian First Book Award. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, The International New York Times, Words Without Borders, Wasafiri, BBC Radio 4 among others. Her second novel is Children of Our Age (Jantar Publishing, 2017). She lives in London. (Photo by Mariusz Smiejek.)
A.M. Bakalar was born and raised in Wroclaw, Poland. She lives in London. Her first novel 'Madame Mephisto' was published in 2012 and was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award by readers. Her writing has appeared in various publications, including The Guardian and The International New York Times. She was the editor of Litro Magazine Polish Issue and her short story, ‘Whatever Makes you Sleep at Night’ was published in Wasafiri. Asia has appeared on BBC Radio 3 Night Waves, Proms Plus Literary, BBC Radio 4 At Home Abroad. Her short story ‘Woman of Your Dreams’ was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2015. Her second novel, 'Children of Our Age' was published in 2017.
A.M. Bakalar’s first novel Madame Mephisto was among readers’ recommendations for the Guardian First Book Award.
Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The International New York Times, Wasafiri, B O D Y and Litro Magazine. She was the editor of Litro Magazine Polish Issue and her short story ‘Whatever Makes You Sleep at Night’ was published in Wasafiri. Asia also appeared on BBC Radio 3 Night Waves and Proms Plus Literary.
A.M. Bakalar lives in London.
A.M. Bakalar's debut novel MADAME MEPHISTO (Stork Press, 2012) was a reader nomination for the 2012 Guardian First Book Award. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, The International New York Times, Words Without Borders, LA Review of Books, Wasafiri, Boundless Magazine, BBC Radio 4 among others. Her second novel is CHILDREN OF OUR AGE (Jantar Publishing, 2017).
A.M. Bakalar was born in Poland and lives in London, UK. For more information visit her website: www.ambakalar.com or follow her blog: http://ambakalar.tumblr.com/
My first novel MADAME MEPHISTO was published in 2012 and was among readers' recommendations for the 2012 Guardian First Book Award.
My second novel, CHILDREN OF OUR AGE, was published in October 2017. My work has appeared in The Guardian, The International New York Times, Wasafiri, Words Without Borders, LA Review of Books, BBC Radio among others. www.ambakalar.com
A.M. Bakalar is a writer. Her debut novel Madame Mephisto was among readers’ nominations to the 2012 Guardian First Book Award. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian and the International New York Times. She was the editor of Litro Magazine Polish Issue. She was born in Poland and lives and writes in London.
A.M. Bakalar’s first novel Madame Mephisto was published in 2012 and was a reader nomination for the 2012 Guardian First Book Award. Her second novel Children of Our Age is published in October 2017.
Her writing has appeared in various publications, including The Guardian, The International New York Times, LA Review of Books, Wasafiri, Words Without Borders, Bookanista, Boundless Magazine among others. She was the editor of Litro Magazine Polish Issue. Asia also appeared on BBC Radio 3 Night Waves, Proms Plus Literary, BBC Radio 4. Her short story ‘Woman of Your Dreams’ was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2015.
Asia was born and raised in Wroclaw, Poland. She lives in London.
A.M. Bakakar’s Blog: http://ambakalar.tumblr.com/
You can contact Asia via email: ambakalar@gmail.com
Children of Our Age
Publishers Weekly. 265.5 (Jan. 29, 2018): p171.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Children of Our Age
A.M. Bakalar. Jantar (Dufour, dist.), $21 trade paper (368p) ISBN 978-0-9933773-3-4
Bakalar (Madame Mephisto) artfully interweaves several narrative strands in this enthralling crime novel and manages the impressive feat of humanizing thuggish brothers Damian and Igor Kulesza, who work as enforcers, without making any apologies for their brutal tendencies. The brothers are part of a sophisticated fraud operation run by Karol Sosnowski, who identifies people whose "desperate circumstances provided the perfect opportunity to dismantle their lives and reassemble them again to suit his own well-thought-out plans." Karol, who's a student of psychologist Abraham Maslow, entices his fellow Poles to leave their homeland for the promise of gainful employment in London, where their identities are appropriated so that Karol can use them to apply for government benefits and loans that will line his own purse. The plight of Karol's victims is palpable, and Bakalar does a superb job of making him a plausible mastermind in this realistic tale of the challenges Polish immigrants face in 21st-century London. Captivating phrasing ("There were other things, less terrible things, the Kulesza brothers were supposed to be doing") enhances the skillful storytelling. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Children of Our Age." Publishers Weekly, 29 Jan. 2018, p. 171. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526116527/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=223bf276. Accessed 23 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A526116527
A.M. Bakalar: Children of Our Age
World Literature Today. 92.3 (May-June 2018): p63.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Full Text:
A.M. Bakalar
Children of Our Age
Jantar
Children of Our Age is centered on the Polish community of London. The book is filled with a wide variety of characters, with different threads leading back to their pasts in Poland and tying them to their present lives in London. They become connected as their lives converge and their desires come into conflict. A thrilling story of exploitation and deceit, Children of Our Age is a powerful look at the immigrant experience.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A.M. Bakalar: Children of Our Age." World Literature Today, vol. 92, no. 3, 2018, p. 63. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536987273/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=87398d19. Accessed 23 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536987273
27/07/2012 | 4 Comments
Madame Mephisto by A. M. Bakalar
For many people the idea that we invent ourselves is, at the very least, an uncomfortable truth, while for others it is nothing less than blasphemy, a dirty secret to be warded off by waving crosses and national flags. We are where we come from, they say, formed by the way our parents raised us and the culture we grew up in. That this can be subverted, that it might not even be true, breaks through the most firmly held beliefs of selfhood.
From the outset of A. M. Bakalar’s impressive debut novel Madame Mephisto the reader is given only spare hints of what kind of book they are reading. There is a funeral, but we don’t know whose. There is a monologue, or confession, or rant – to what we gather is a captive listener, though again we are left in the dark as to the circumstances.
The concept of life as an experiment we perform on ourselves is hard to entertain if you pass from cradle to grave in the same place. But for immigrants like Magda, the story’s narrator who has left her native Poland for cosmopolitan London, sometimes a geographical escape is not enough. Magda rails passionately and convincingly against the bulwarks of her Catholic, conservative and often intolerant homeland. She is a liberated woman whose take on and personal experience of issues such as Poland’s near absolute ban on abortion makes compelling reading.
Yet this advocate of just causes just happens to be a big time drug dealer, with marijuana growth, distribution and sales operations stretching from bleak, industrial eastern Poland to London High Society. Magda is determined to hide her criminal operations from the authorities through an often humiliating cover existence in the corporate world. It is the seemingly easier task of hiding her real source of income from her family back home that brings the strains of her double life to the fore.
Madame Mephisto touches on the worlds of international crime, corporate culture, globalization and immigration and deftly manages to explore what has and hasn’t changed in Polish social mores since the end of communism through a vivid portrait of Magda’s family. In a way, all these topics, including Magda’s elaborate (if not totally convincing) drug operations, are also just a cover for her attempt to recreate herself.
Just as it gradually becomes possible to begin guessing the circumstances of Magda’s confession, it also becomes clear that she is not telling her life’s story but, in a way, recreating it as she tells it.
Early on in her narration she bluntly rejects the idea that she had been able to reinvent herself: “No matter how much I wanted to escape from my birthplace, and find solace in inventing my new immigrant identity I was forced to admit to myself that the essence of my being was formed where I came from.”
All experiments require a control. It is the constant element used as a basis of comparison. This role is played by Magda’s twin sister Alicja, though constancy is much easier to maintain in a laboratory than in real life (or at least in a novel depicting real life). It is against the foil of her seemingly successful, dutiful sister – the person she loves most in the world – that Magda increases the force of her attempts to break from her former self like a mad scientist turning the electrical charge to full power:
“My inclination towards emotional destruction – or should I say experimentation with human nature – took a new turn. If I was to see whether the ‘she’ inside me could eradicate any form of belonging I would have to go further than extracting myself geographically. I would have to go back to face my family on their own ground. My true adversary was waiting for me in Poland.”
This sounds like the setup for a gunfight but Bakalar stages her confrontations in more incongruous scenes, such as a hideously tense and at times touching Christmas dinner. In the end, the mystery of who has died and who has heard Magda’s story is revealed. As to whether Magda’s experiment succeeds or not – or even whether such an experiment is possible – is for the reader of this gripping story to decide.
Photos – 1) Madame Mephisto cover, 2) Oregano from my kitchen, photo by DEA 3) Camden Town High Street, photo by Misterzee/wikimedia
The Chains of the Past: On A. M. Bakalar’s “Children of Our Age”
By Mary Rodgers
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JANUARY 17, 2018
WE ARE ALL, to one degree or another, both products and prisoners of our backgrounds. Through an exploration of modern-day human trafficking, A. M. Bakalar’s unflinching yet ultimately compassionate second novel, Children of Our Age, confronts the physical and emotional carnage that results from an inability to relinquish the chains of the past.
Bakalar precedes the novel with an excerpt from Polish Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska’s poem “Children of Our Age,” from which the book draws its title:
Whether you like it or not
Your genes have a political past
Your skin, a political cast
Your eyes, a political slant.
In the early 1980s, when martial law was declared in Poland, Szymborska, known for her increasingly overt criticisms of the government, was forced into hiding for almost a decade, printing her works in various underground publications under a pseudonym. This rebellious, risk-taking stance is something of a tradition for Polish writers.
Bakalar’s first novel, Madame Mephisto (2012), told from the perspective of a female Polish drug lord operating in London, is also quite critical of Polish culture and politics. In interviews, the author has discussed the hate messages she received from her countrymen after Madame Mephisto was published. She was attacked for displaying a complete lack of patriotism in her fiction; that the novel is no less critical of Britain is a point often lost on Bakalar’s fellow Poles.
One can only imagine, then, what the increasingly authoritarian Polish government under the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, and its supporters, would make of Bakalar’s latest novel. Human trafficking in general has become the subject of much media interest of late, but it is a very recent, ugly permutation of the phenomenon — Polish expats trafficking other Poles into the United Kingdom for benefits fraud — that forms the narrative fulcrum about which Bakalar’s cast of characters revolves.
The book opens with a shocking incident perpetrated by brothers and thugs-at-arms Damian and Igor, who work as enforcers for criminal mastermind Karol. Soon after, we meet Karol’s wife, the hard-nosed entrepreneur Milena, as well as pious Angelika, her bumbling husband Mateusz, and their increasingly distant daughter, Karolina, and a host of lesser players within a tightly knit community of Polish expats. Thus the stage is set, and the story rockets along in classic thriller style as we watch the seemingly disparate lives of Bakalar’s immigrants connect and, in some cases, self-destruct with the terrifying inexorability of ships caught in the maw of a giant whirlpool.
Bakalar does not shy away from describing the horrors endured by the trafficked Poles, whether it’s Karol’s cool, clinical voice detailing how he tricks them into relinquishing their passports, bank cards, and, eventually, their dignity, or the heartbreaking physical descriptions of the men forced to work from sunup to sundown gathering mollusks for paychecks that never materialize, their “hands like leather, swollen with fractured nails and grimed dirt, the coarse skin broken in places, raw with pain; painfully damaged by the mixture of biting seawater, gale and sharp shells.” The world the author depicts is a singular example of human brutality. Separated from their families and the only home they know, unfamiliar with local customs, unable to speak the local language and made into slaves by their unscrupulous supposed benefactor, the immigrants are strangers in a land that is not only foreign to them, but also relentlessly hostile.
One of the key elements of the novel’s structure is Bakalar’s choice regarding point of view. The easy — and perhaps lazier — option would have been to tell the story strictly from the victim’s standpoint, thus garnering instant sympathy from the reader. Instead, the author gives us a firsthand look into the minds of the perpetrators of evil, a decision that proves as mesmerizing as it is uncomfortable. One of the strengths of the writing is that even the most repugnant members of Bakalar’s cast become somewhat sympathetic; their histories and innermost desires are so well laid out that we feel a sense of kinship with them, simply because we understand their motivations. None of them were born evil. Years of pattern-building, of being defined by their relationships to one another, shaped who they are. We are forced to recognize that they are as trapped in their roles by other people’s assessments of their worth and temperaments as they are by their own.
This is particularly evident in the co-dependent relationship between Damian and his younger brother, the dangerously unstable Igor. Their shared history fosters a strong bond, but that connection hampers as much as it protects them. They cannot transform until they escape each other’s gazes. And indeed, it is only through a chance meeting and subsequent unlikely friendship with someone who has no preconceived ideas about Igor that he manages to break free from Damian and make the choice to “recover what was left of himself, lose the fury that had been devouring his mind from within.”
Adapt or die is a recurrent theme in the narrative. Only the players who manage to divest themselves of established notions about their relationships are able to escape and claim some kind of happiness. Those who cannot are doomed. On a broader level, this reflects the age-old struggle of the immigrant. Survival depends on the ability to change, to fit the mores and lifestyle of the adopted country.
This struggle for survival can prove quite desperate. Throughout the novel, Bakalar uses her characters to make shrewd psychological observations about the inventive ways in which people manipulate others to establish dominance and elevate their own status. There are no selfless angels here; everyone has something to hide, and everyone is able to justify inhumane behavior. A prime example of this is Karol, who desires “power, unlimited control — some extraordinary version of himself.” Toward that end, he has become the greatest of con men, so attuned to human sensibilities that he always has the right lie at hand when he needs it, and so convinced of his own superiority that he feels no guilt whatsoever as he condemns his fellow countrymen to desperate lives of poverty and forced labor.
Their faith in him only confirms his disdain: “If people were stupid enough to believe his lies, Karol believed they deserved to suffer the consequences.” This concept of just deserts — as the manically cheerful Angelika states, “Good things come to good people” — reverberates throughout the story. All the characters cling to their notions of themselves as good, honest, hardworking people. It’s their protection, an amulet meant to shield them from the dark forces in life. As the narrative progresses and their worlds come apart, they are caught completely off guard by the apparent unfairness of their predicaments, unable to make sense of why disaster has disrupted their lives.
And yet, amid all the splashy double-dealing and self-involved machinations, a quieter thread emerges, an examination of how people, particularly those who are marginalized or who behave in ways that put them beyond the protections of normal society, express love. Bakalar’s damaged and often damaging characters still find ways to affirm their affection for one another, though at first this might not be immediately obvious. For one, it’s the gift of silence; for another, it’s the gift of listening; for still another, the gift of remembering, even when that act brings personal pain. Material presents and commodities are exchanged as well, but it’s the small, unadorned offerings of the soul that have the greatest impact on relationships and the story’s outcome.
From time to time, the pace of the novel suffers a few lulls, brief moments where it can’t quite decide whether it’s a thriller or a rumination on human nature. But this is a minor quibble. Children of Our Age is an ambitious work of great scope and power. While the book’s arresting subject matter makes it very much a story of today, the narrative transcends its era. The book is a searing exploration of the ways in which people value and degrade one another, and of how moments of impulse and whim, rather than carefully reasoned action, can change the course of our lives.
¤
Mary Rodgers is a writer, actor, and musician who splits her time between the United States and the United Kingdom.
Guardian First Book Award reader nominations: Madame Mephisto by A M Bakalar
The call for reader nominations to find a 10th title for the first book award longlist produced 11 eligible books. In the latest report back from our panel of reader reviewers, GetOver99 is incarcerated with a Polish drug dealer
GetOver99
Tue 24 Jul 2012 16.15 BST
First published on Tue 24 Jul 2012 16.15 BST
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Home or away? ... Magda's ciity, Warsaw. Photograph: David Levene
Magda is a feisty Polish immigrant who has come to London to be a drug dealer. She narrates her story through the first person, and you are in a room with her for five days while she tells you all about her past and present. At the start you are not sure who you are. I liked this about the book as it was fun trying to work it out.
The main story follows Magda as she struggles to adjust to the cultural differences between Poland and the UK. She feels she doesn't belong in Poland. Her mother is a proud Polish matriarch who cannot understand why her daughter would want to leave her home country. All she should want from life is to marry and have kids. This is the last thing Madga would want to do and she goes about setting up a seemingly successful drug-dealing enterprise.
Magda is a strong, selfish character who is really only out for herself. She ends up being sacked from all her jobs as she fails to fit in with London life. She keeps in constant touch with her twin sister back home in Warsaw and returns home at different times through the book.
Magda makes some great observations about Britain and is pretty scathing about the Polish and their culture. The most enjoyable part of the book, for me, were her trips back home. She has a very fractious relationship with her mother and a complicated relationship with her sister and sister's husband.
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Ultimately though, I felt the book promised more that it delivered. It came with some interesting tag lines: "I am a professional liar. I am two people. I am the best thing that ever happened to you" and "What would you talk about if you were stuck in a room with a drug dealer for five days?"
This suggested that we were in for a dark, edgy book based around these statements. I didn't feel the story lived up to these the expectations.
Magda supposedly has an alter ego with dark, violent thoughts, and we should be wary of her. My problem with this was that we didn't see her act on these thoughts enough. Don't we all have darker thoughts that we don't really act on? There was a promise of this dark character at the Polish wedding, which I found really funny, but there was really not enough of it to warrant the statements made.
I also struggled to believe the authenticity of Madga as a drug dealer. In no time at all she appears to be a drugs lord. She claims to be an expert at growing cannabis, an international drug smuggler, she has heavies working for her who will kill on her command and has the power to bribe the police.
She offers no explanation on how she gained this status. I think for me to believe all of this the author would need to go into some detail. I also found the characters used to help her set up her business in the UK a bit obvious.
On the whole I did enjoy this book and if the story was longer and the author offered a more detailed, authentic explanation of how she became a top player in the underworld it could have been so much better.
Madame Mephisto
A.M. Bakalar
Published by Stork Press 19 April 2012
240pp, paperback, 8.99
Reviewed by Elsbeth Lindner
Mother Poland is comprehensively slammed in A.M. Bakalar’s punchy debut, a tale of Polish migration that supplements its core of rebellion and noncomformity with a layer of melodrama.
Its narrator, who has the habit of switching from first to third person, is Magda Rodziewicz, revealing her experiences and feelings to an unnamed relative, possibly her twin sister Alicja. The mystery figure is definitely not her traditionalist mother whose Roman Catholicism, immersion in home-making and insistence on marriage and motherhood as the only fit roles for girl children are some of the reasons Magda quit Poland for a new life in London.
However Magda’s distaste for her homeland extends far beyond her mother, to withering criticism of Polish religion, politics, traditions, backwardness, racism and hypocrisy. So is she a modern free spirit, a voice of the new generation of Polish migrants, or something more Machiavellian?
Her story is peppered with grandiose, Iago-esque statements of exclusion: ‘I do not believe in happy endings’; ‘Hatred, conflict, confusions have become the basis of my existence.’ And then there’s the drug-dealing. Although much of the novel is devoted to accounts of the various jobs Magda performs in London until sacked – accounts which offer some comic snapshots of the UK workplace from her truculent perspective – these are all apparent covers for her real work, ‘saving lives’, i.e. supplying home-grown cannabis to actors, city traders, corrupt policemen, even a Booker-shortlisted novelist.
Mouthpiece of new Poland or amoral ballbreaker? The dilemma over Magda reaches a conclusion in the body-swerving last quarter of the book, as the identity of the character receiving her confession emerges and a synthesis takes place. Prickly, love-me-or-hate-me Magda wil stick to her determined path while also accepting her family responsibilities.
Bakalar’s novel, packed with these choice juxtapositions, has moments of pure rant, including plenty to say about Polish immigrants to the UK: ‘Staying among Poles, speaking Polish all day long, makes you lazy. No wonder most Poles work as builders, fruit and vegetable pickers, cleaners, factory workers. You don’t need a certificate in advanced English to do these jobs.’
Controversial opinions and confrontational characterization aside, what’s most striking about the book is its vigour and the curious charisma of Magda herself. Balakar has created a contemporary anti-heroine with a heart of pure titanium, the bad girl who eventually comes if not exactly good, then good–ish.
Madame Mephisto: one really bad girl
Madame Mephisto is being marketed with the following phrase “What would you talk about if you were stuck in a room with a drug dealer for five days?”. Well, forget about this long sentence, I don’t think it makes any justice to the novel. So if you see it and feel like shrugging, think twice.
I read this novel on a pdf format, thinking it would prove a huge challenge to keep me interested while keeping my eyes fixed on my computer screen (yes, I don’t have a Kindle and probably never will). Hour and a half later I was still glued to my chair scrolling down Madame Mephisto’s pages with a smile on my face. Need to say more? Ok here I go.
The great triumph of A.M Bakalar’s first novel is, in my opinion, the tone of the novel. The story is narrated by Magda, a charismatic, beautiful and successful drug dealer who is incredibly honest (and perhaps cynical) about the way she sees life.
Magda yawns at the never ending social pressure of meeting Mr Right Guy, getting married, having children and living the so perfect family life as if happiness was all about following that recipe. Her mother is sometimes the most annoying creature on the planet, Christmas family lunch can be the year’s most boring event, the Catholic church sucks, the work environment is full of fake and stiff people. Sounds familiar?
A.M. Bakalar created a memorable anti-heroine, worth adapting to the big screen. The fact that she controls and distribute the capital’s cannabis market makes her even more attractive as a character. She is the Polish-Londoner female drug baroness, that reminded me of Teresa Mendoza, the world famous drug trafficker that inspired Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s to write The Queen of the South. See? Women can be bad, really bad girls too!
The narrative in first person gives the story a natural flow making the events credible. And as the story develops, we are also witnessing a life confession that will end in an extraordinary and moving way. In a nutshell, thumps up to A.M Bakalar for a fantastic first novel!
Madame Mephisto is published in the UK by Stork Press.