Swallowing Mercury by Wioletta Greg

 

Swallowing Mercury by Wioletta Greg

Polish fiction

Original title – Guguly(unripe)

Translator – Eliza Marciniak

Source – review copy

I choose to jump this up my books to review I only finished it this morning it is another tale of childhood like the previous review and also like tha has a slightly Fable like stories in it . Wioletta Greg grew up in the Jurassic Highlands of Poland , where this novella is set she left in 2006 , she is a poet as well as a writer she won the Griffin poetry prize for her poetry this is her first novella to be translated to English .

Disobeying my mother , I started sleeping with Blacky, Blacky smelled of hay and milk and had a snow-white map of africa around his neck. He would come to me in the night, lie on my duvet and start purring, kneading the covers like dough under his paws .Ever since I found him up in the attic we lived in a strange state of symbois. I’d carry him inside my jumper like a baby, steal cream for him from the dresses and, on Sundays, feed him chicken wings from my soup .

THe cat she has Blacky which disappears as quickly as he appeared in the attic .

This as I said is the story of a childhood , one must assume it is some what from Wioletta’s own childhood . It follows Wiola a young girl , she has a cat that she likes to have slept on her bed even thou her mother has vowed this shouldn’t happen the cat Blacky mysteriously disappears one day , She also likes to collect Match labels this nearly gets her into trouble after she takes them into school for a show and tell. Then they have the excitement of Pope John Paul visiting his homeland and they are told he may go through their village in his popemobile .These are a glimpse of a childhood , in the background we see Lech Walsea  and then when the strikes keep happening through Wiola eyes we see a change of regime when Jaruzelski took control of the Government in 1981 when her favourite tv show isn’t shown more a speech by the General on what is happen Martial law see through a childs eyes not quite getting the full view of what is happening.

In the same year that a rumour spread through Hecktary that the pope would drive past ou village, my father took over the running of the farm and , to my grandmothers dismay, began to introduce reforms, gradually turning our homestead into an unruly and exuberant zoo. It wasn’t just beehives and cages with goldfinches, canaries and rabbits, or a dovecote in the attic, where clumsy nestlings hatched out of delicate eggs that looked like table-tennis balls. In the middle of February,right after my birthday, wanting to cheer me up after the loss of Blacky, Dad pulled out of his jacket a little soggy, squeaking ball of fluff, which by the warmth of the stove gradually began to turn into a several-weeks old Tarta sheepdog.We called him Bear

The year the pope may have come to the village they open a zoo, I remember the roundabout zoo on League of gentlemen .

This is a childhood of a child growing up in Poland , but I was remind how much of what Wiola said about the Poland of the time I remembered . It seems another world now where British tv showed news of what was happening in Poland at that time I still remember without even looking up the face of Lech Walsea and General Jaruzelski. This is full of a love of the place but also a sense of the darkness in the background . Wioletta style of writing is rich like that of Herta Muller full of colour and place the village life  and characters we meet jump of the page. I said I jumped this up the review list as it was similar in nature to The brothers where we see a world through a childs eyes a fable like world These are fragments of her past the style is rather like Laurain the french writer in a way the both evoke the 80’s which is why both grab me , as their memories are intertwined with my own of the times as they are from my own youth when here we took more notice of the outside world than we do now.The title was changed but I like the view of the original one Unripened fruit at the time of fruit picking rather like Wiola in her world not quite an adult in an adult world .