If you're up for a very eerie reading experience, I can absolutely recommend this book: it's short, but offers an inimitable chain of reflections on what the essence of a city is. The Polish Magdalena Tulli (°1955) is a biologist by training and profession, but started publishing poems and prose at a late age. This book was her prose debut, in 1995. I'm not the first to say it, but the link with Bruno Schultz's surrealist tales is very obvious. And of course the Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino also come into the picture, which inevitably gives Tulli the label postmodern. But I would like to add another reference: the phenomenal graphic series Les Cités Obscures by the Belgians François Schuiten and Benoit Peeters, in which they bring the most bizarre cities to life in both drawings and texts. It seems as if Tulli has extracted some of her texts from the work of Schuiten and Peeters. In any case: this book certainly is extraordinary, with surreal associations and contrasting effects, set in a philosophical tone with occasionally fantastic passages, but often also sought-after effects. This will certainly put off many readers, but Tulli at least manages to illustrate perfectly how cities are each in themseleves a microcosm, anchored in the real world as well as in the imaginary. ( )

Initially published in 1995 and a winner of the Polish Koscielski Foundation Prize, Dreams and Stones is a work built of stone and metaphor. Abstaining from conventional narrative structure, Tulli's Dreams has been categorized as simply a "novel" by author, the ambiguous "prose-poem" by translator Bill Johnston, and the often gone to "postmodern" by many a critic. The craving of categorical summations aside, it is the story of a great city rebuilt. In myth and metaphor, with Tree and Machine, Tulli offers up the burgeoning fruit of an ideal and captivates one within its evanescent existence, its life cycle.

When I first read the synopsis for Tulli's Dreams and Stones it precipitated both a keen interest in the book and a wariness that it might not live up to the extravagant praise decorating its back cover. I have to admit to ignorance concerning Bruno Schulz; as such, the synopsis comparison between his work and Tulli's fell flat for me. However, having read Tulli's poetic and stirring Dreams it is an ignorance I plan to correct as soon as possible.

Dreams and Stones is the risen cream, a compendious reduction in which its prose and Tulli's use of metaphor is thickened and intensified so that each word, each taste, is easily savored. Though a short read, Dreams offers up relatable imagery that conjures rich reflection on the worth of an ideal and its reality, the build and lifespan of society, and the interplay between humanity and the world that sheathes it.

Prior to starting, I saw this as a quick read. It ended up being better experienced in short bursts which allowed me to sit with the material a bit and relish it. Tulli's prose has a beautiful energy to it and it carries great philosophical weight. Both offer up satisfying depths to bask in and reading it in bursts was a perfect opportunity to prolong it.

Bill Johnston's translation of this work seems to be strong, authentic, and satisfying. While this will inevitably be added to my Read in its Original Language pile, as well as my To Be Reread (many times) mountain, I enjoyed Johnston's version immensely. There is this fulfilling sensation to be had from authentic translations that seem to really connect with an author's energy and context such as in Robert Pinsky's translation of Dante's Inferno, a lasting favorite translation of mine. I felt that essence with this translation as well.

I'd like to thank NetGalley and Archipelago for the opportunity to read this book.


( )

Dreams and Stones is a “not non-fiction” story of a city—indeed, of all cities—which exist as fruit born upon the tree of the world. Like all fruit the city ripens to a perfect moment, whereupon it continues to ripen until it becomes soft and decaying, and eventually drops to the ground to ferment and disintegrate, releasing the seed inside that will become a tree which will bear more fruit. It is also the story of a city as a machine that continually breaks and repairs and breaks and repairs again, as though life is something that is pulled and pushed along by the turning of cogs. These two metaphors, the tree and the machine, are so entangled with each other in Tulli’s work they are hardly distinguishable. Far from being competing conceptions of the world, they are more a question of perspective: sometimes we look at a thing and think of how it is like a tree. Sometimes we look at it and see the machine. Sometimes the tree seems like a machine; sometimes the machine grows like a tree.Dreams and Stones might be called an extended exploration into how trees are machines, and machines are trees. Or of how we are both.

We tend to think of creation stories as tales of beginnings, how we came to be what we are. They exist in the distant and untouchable past, a memory that has lost its distinction and details over the ages. But myths do not really operate this way. Nor, for that matter, do stories. They are not “past” but exist in a kind of eternal present—they are always being told because we are always telling them, always reading them. Thus, when Eve bites into the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, we are not hearing a story of how we were kicked out of the Garden of Eden, we are hearing a story of why we don’t live in it now.

The genius in Magdalena Tulli’s work is her conscious awareness that we are doomed to live in this eternal present that is the province of fiction. Our sense of the future is dreamy. Our sense of the past is, as Faulkner so famously pointed out, not past. Even though Dreams and Stones describes the life cycle of a city from its idealized inception on drafting paper to its eventual death among a tangle of ruins, refuse, and flood, the idea that things have a beginning and an end is something of a pretense. It is all beginning and ending simultaneously, all the time. Tulli is exquisitely aware of the malleability of our sense of time:

Every night, to the rhythm of tomorrow’s newspapers revolving on the drums of the rotary presses, the cities of yesterday are rolled up and then vanish. In the morning no trace of them remains. When the new day is over the city will be thoroughly and utterly used up; nothing will be left of it besides the nouns, verbs, adjectives, affirmative and negative sentences drifting everywhere. Yesterday’s chair, hat and teapot are already beyond the reach of today’s hand, immaterial and unusable. And those who went to bed yesterday evening exist today in the same immaterial way as yesterday’s teapots.

Eventually, life seems to move faster and faster for the inhabitants of the city, until it seems to have little to do with the ticking of clocks or the motion of the hands on their watches, and the people seem to be perpetually rising to go to work, or sitting down to pour tea, with little to distinguish one day’s tea from the next.
This idea, that the past is as present as the present, and the present is as insubstantial as the past, would almost be Zen, except that the goal of the Zen practitioner is surely to free oneself of this world of illusion, whereas the inhabitants of the city are forever trapped in an ephemeral existence. Or, as Tulli puts it elsewhere, “Every glance is accompanied by an awareness of loss.”

...

Excerpted from a profile written about the author for the website Bloom

When I read Tulli's In Red last year, I was so absorbed in her creation of an unreal world filled with clearly envisioned people, beautiful writing, and illusion and allusion that I nearly missed my subway stop twice. This novella, her first, also is filled with beautifully poetic writing and illusion and allusion, but I never got that absorbed in it. I am impressed by what Tulli has accomplished, but I am quite sure that I really didn't understand a lot of it.

The book describes the creation, life, and decay of an unnamed city which, as the novella progresses, appears to be a mythical version of Warsaw (described as a city with the straight lines of W's and A's in its name). In the beginning, the dichotomy of tree-like growth (natural, uncontrolled, always branching, balanced by an equally large root system) versus machine-made growth (human-directed, controlled, always increasing, balanced by an "anti-city") is established, and later the dichotomy of dreams and stones. At times the city seems to grow to encompass the world, and the skies and the stars; at times later in the book, it both seems to contain other (named) cities and to be apart from them. There are times when the mood of the people is described, but they are always spoken of generally; there are no individual characters. This description is much more straightforward than the book itself!

As the city grows, there were places where I felt Tulli was commenting on some of the history and politics of Warsaw and Poland itself, although I am not familiar enough with that to catch more than a few allusions. Certainly the determination to destroy the anti-city could allude to the communist era, as could the awards for manual and machine workers who accomplished a lot in little time. The choice of train lines heading east (to Russia) or west (to Paris) could refer to different pulls on the Polish people. But I have to stress that all of this happens in the most allusive way, so it is possible to understand it in different ways.

Tulli's writing is poetic, and a delight to read, and this book is more a collection of imagery and a parable than a novel. Some of the recurring images and ideas are architecture and lines (straight versus meandering), shifts in time and space (also true of In Red), the ephemeral quality of dreams (and us?) and the permanence of stone. Other readers have commented that Tulli has translated Calvino and that there are echoes of his Invisible Cities in this book; I have that on the TBR and will get to it soon.

All in all, I am glad I read this book, but I'm especially glad I read In Red first, as I would not have been so enthusiastic about Tulli I had come to this one first.

A big disappointment. Ok, it's true that I read it on a plane. It's true that it was going over many time zones and I was bored and tired, but it struck me that it could have been a great book if the communists were still in power. Then you had to work underground with your meaning and your themes. And everyone was hungry for allusions to reality. But really, it was 1999 when the book was first published. It didn't need to be so full of hidden meaning in times when you didn't need political allusion anymore. Especially when you talked about communist times. It could have said things straight. Sure, it would have been a different book then, but perhaps the one would have enjoyed more. The way it was, it only irritated me. ( )