Warsaw. “Książka o miłości” (“Book About Love”), Bruno Schulz’s review of Tadeusz Breza’s Adam Grywałd, appears in Tygodnik Ilustrowany.
Schulz’s text about Tadeusz Breza’s debut novel is written in a very flattering tone. Schulz praises the author for, among other things, “the gift of intensive focus on the very thin narrative thread” and a kind of sincere enthusiasm, “the naïveté of an artist amazed at his subject” thanks to which Breza managed to give Adam Grywałd the form of an almost organic fusion of the subject and language: “Hardly any writer can make spiritual physiognomy converge into this bodily unity with the course of monologue, with the articulation of the sentence, rarely expressed so completely in the smallest element!”. This homogeneity of the work testifies to the great talent of the writer, says Schulz, but it causes a problem for the reviewer, who, using the language of analysis, is bound to rely on simplification.
The subject of the novel was also very interesting to Schulz: the complex love relationship of the three heroes – Grywałd, Iza and her brother Edmund (Schulz noticed Breza’s novelty especially in using homoerotic motifs) – and “the melancholic, gentle tone of prose, noble monotony of sentences” which create an “intoxicating and stunning” aura of dusk Above all, however, Schulz seems to be fascinated by the way the author approaches the subject: according to Schulz, he does not provide a narrative presentation of love events, but rather tries to reconstruct – from the narrative fragments of gossip, overheard conversations and passages from Grywałd’s diary – a myth, a legend, “a shadow of this great, almost mythical love”.
Overall, Schulz rated Breza’s novel very highly, considering it a “brave and somewhat revolutionary act on our ground; at the same time, there is no trace of the bombast of revolution, the spirit of negation or demonstrative novelty in this book. It is a positive and noble, unforced and refined revolutionism”. (jo)
