cover image The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel

The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel

Magdalena Zyzak. Holt, $25 (288p) ISBN 978-0-8050-9510-4

This first novel by a Polish-born writer now living in the U.S. is a wild, imaginative farce, a mix of folktale with magical realism, Dostoevsky conflated with Woody Allen, and it will infuriate as many readers as it delights. The Barnabas Pierkiel of the title is a farmer in the fictional Slavic country of Scalvusia in 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II. The narrator, “a self-effacing bureaucrat,” tells Pierkiel’s story and the story of Scalvusia—which failed to survive the war—in the form of a picaresque. The style is old-fashioned and formal, painted with a broad, almost surreal brush. Pierkiel is an antihero, an innocent, driven primarily by his daydreams and his lust for Roosha Papusha, a “gypsy” woman. He’s surrounded by an immense cast of characters, most of whom have narrowly defined roles (such as “Kumashko the priest” and “Daria the spinster”). Zyzak is a clever writer, but it’s hard to know what to make of the novel; it’s not dramatic in any classic sense, and it treads on the edge of being insulting (her villagers come off as stereotypically provincial proles; one popular pastime, apparently, is “ramming bottle caps into each other’s foreheads”). Perhaps the point is that no amount of knowingness or sophistication could prevent the destruction of Scalvusia, first by the Germans and then the Soviets, but there’s something frustrating about the farcical tone. (Jan.)