A chance encounter, continued

Following notice at reference 1, I have got around to reading the book which is said to be the ultimate source of the film 'Being There', that is to say reference 4. About an ordinary sort of chap, once a humble clerk, who, following a chance leg-up, blags and bluffs his way to the top of the heap. With the population at large mistaking coarseness and vulgarity for the hidden depths of a man who speaks to you directly and honestly. Who says what has to be said, without all the flimflam of establishment types, intellectuals and other undesirables. Do I smell a Trump?

A fantasy from inter-war Poland, with echoes for me from Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh and Jaroslav Hašek (the chap who wrote Švejk), all roughly contemporary. Plus a touch of Simeon smut. All good fun, if a little too long at near 300 pages. 

The translators strike a good tone, getting the slang just about right. As good in that way as the Parrott translation of Švejk. 

The impression is given that the government of inter-war Poland was a bit of a mess, not least because of monumental amounts of corruption and abuse of power. With plenty of dodgy aristos in the mix, just like here in the UK at that time. An impression which is confirmed at reference 7.

A sprinkling of mildly anti-Semitic cracks in the way of a lot of writing by otherwise respectable authors of the time - but not enough to deter the author of the intermediate work at reference 3, a Polish Jew who survived the war years there before moving to the US. A chap with a complicated life, altogether worthy of the hero of his original.

We are reminded that people from central Europe used to like to eat, drink and smoke a great deal. They liked to make a splash. And there was no dishonour in the servants fishing all the drunks out of the bushes in the garden and putting them to bed. Maybe all this is still true today.

All in all, not quite as anodyne as the Sellers-MacLaine version, which is just rather gentle fun by comparison.

A nicely produced book, apparently from the Northwestern University Press in Evanston, Illinois, but on closer inspection from the Lightning Source people here at Milton Keynes, the people whom I first came across at reference 5. But headquartered at 1122 Heil Quaker Boulevard, La Vergne, Tennessee, tucked in behind East Branch Hurricane Creek and snapped above from Street View. 

The waters of this creek flows into the J Percy Priest Reservoir on the outskirts of Nashville, and from there into Cumberland River. Eventually they make it to the Ohio and then to the Mississippi River, and so to the Gulf of Mexico. See the rather good reference 8. But have a care as there is more than one East Branch Hurricane Creek.

The present book has the advantage over that at reference 5 of being a novel without pictures, so it is not let down in that department. If it were not for the Lightning Source logo inside the back cover, you would never know. Clever stuff, for which see reference 6 and ask for Lighting Source.

PS: vergne is a provincial French word - Breton - for a tree, particularly the sort of tree which grows in damp or marshy ground. Not to be confused with verge, a small stick, perhaps a baguette or a magician's wand. Amongst other meanings.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/10/a-chance-encounter.html.

Reference 2: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078841/.

Reference 3: Being There - Jerzy Kosiński - 1970. 

Reference 4: The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma - Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz - 1932 and 2020.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/09/bank-street-nyc.html.

Reference 6: https://www.ingramcontent.com/.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Poland_(1918%E2%80%931939).

Reference 8: https://naturalatlas.com/rivers/cumberland-911243.