rights@dukaj.pl
Other Songs
A universe formed by Aristotle in Jacek Dukaj’s impressive novel
The story takes place in a world where the laws ruling the reality are closer to Aristotle’s speculations about the Form and the Matter, than to Newton’s and Einstein’s theories of physics; in the world which is geocentric, built of five elements, where modern science has never developed, being something fundamentally false. The other inspiration comes from Witold Gombrowicz and his deliberations on the power of form in inter-human relations.
Other Songs is a psychological and adventure novel; it’s a war epic and a philosophical treatise; it’s a virus of the mind which changes a reader’s perception of reality.
Hieronim Berbelek was once a man of strong Form; now he is pining away in the role of a merchant, suppressed and battered. But it will be him who will have to face the biggest threat and mystery: adynatoses, impossible beings – impossible, because devoid of form. There is nothing that can be said about them in truth; they deform the language, thoughts and logic.
How does a human being bestows a Form onto himself? What comes before all will to gain power?
Other Songs is a fantasy novel [...], a tribute to 19th-century adventure literature full of African exoticism and tropicalism, and at the same time a philosophical parable.
Mariusz Czubaj, Polityka
Apparently, this is his writing technique – first, he imagines some extraordinary scenery, and then he describes it as if he were summarising a film playing in his head. If this is true, then this time the film has eclipsed all previous ones with its special effects – we have, among other things, a dreamlike description of Alexandria and its library, a city floating above the Mediterranean Sea, airships and interplanetary ships, a lunar colony, Moscow under the rule of a sorcerer, palaces, fortresses and battlefields, all described in an incredibly vivid and deeply imaginative way.
Wojciech Orliński, Gazeta Wyborcza
