Literary novel
Łukasz Barys
The Bones You Carry in Your Pocket

A debut that happens once in a decade

A few days earlier, I found some similar bones in Sonia’s pocket. The evening had caught us by the dirty, bare calves. I spent half the day drifting about the courtyard, until the orange sun slid across the concrete into the darkness. The holidays are always boring, the heat lays a hand over your mouth and you can’t make yourself do anything, everyone else is off vacationing. Mum was dozing after her shift at the market, Grandma was dozing because she’s old, it was up to me to haul my sister to the tub, though she wasn’t having it, she runs away bawling, screaming she can’t stand me.

I let her scream, hoping Mum would wake up and give her a piece of her mind, but she didn’t stir – she was sleeping off all those groceries she’d scanned. For her part, Grandma didn’t give a shit whether we stank or not, all her senses were pretty much clogged – her nose, her pores, her heart – after all, under that apron of hers was all death and disease, and that came before our hygiene.

Anyway, I grabbed Sonia by her frail wrist and pinched her until she finally calmed down – she could see there was no sense playing games. She was afraid of me, and that hurt, but I didn’t say anything, I took her and pulled the ice-cream-splattered shirt over her head and mussed her hair, which seemed oddly stiff, like wood chips. With my other hand I turned on the faucet and then poured a bit of soap into the bottom of the tub. Then I yanked down her shorts and wiped her bloody knees. Sonia’s toes and ankles were nearly black, she’d been walking around all day in sandals and playing with her dolls in the dirt.

“What kind of Barbie are you?” I asked. “A mole-Barbie?”

She didn’t respond, she balled up like a larva and crossed her arms over her protruding belly. Defenceless and scrawny, she was like a miracle in need of protecting, and I wanted to cry. But the water was still pounding away on the cast-iron tub and I had to turn it off – I’d heard enough in nature class about water shortages for animals and people, and from Mum about the bills that her supermarket wages never seemed to cover.

“It’s hot! It’s hot,” Sonia wailed, and I had to pour in a bit of cold. Then more, and some more, until the water was too cold for a bath, but my sister climbed in anyway.

“Why can’t you bathe by yourself? You’re big enough,” I snorted, reaching for the dirty clothes.

I tried cramming the clothes into the overflowing laundry basket, but then I touched something weird. (…) Sonia hadn’t been watching what I was up to, but when she did, she screamed for me to stop. It was too late – I’d managed to shake maybe a dozen brown bones into my open palm, and there in the bathroom it suddenly got unbearably stuffy.

“Where’d you get these?” I asked.

Again she was silent – instead of answering she leaned over the edge of the tub and threw up all over the pyjamas laid out on her towel. Hello Kitty crumpled under the weight of the girl’s vomit. I threw a towel over her. She only had the one pair of pyjamas, and now they were going to need washing.

“Go to bed,” I told Sonia.

As I was doing the laundry, I looked at the bones scattered near the toilet. Jumbled up like a jigsaw, they totally stood out. They were pretty broad, definitely not from poultry. They were speckled brown. I didn’t dare touch them again, so I just knelt by them and stared at the grooves and swirls carved into their surfaces. I found a plastic bag and went back to the washroom, cleaning up the dirt that was tracked in. I didn’t want to sleep, my head ached. I slipped the plastic bag with my trove under my pillow – I could feel it poking through. Sonia and Daniel had nodded off. I could see their dark silhouettes from my bed. I began crying, just like that, and I couldn’t stop. I cried and cried, and the bones lying nearby vibrated. I dreamed of them: I saw the earth outside our house, full of mingled human and animal bones.

Excerpt translated by Soren Gauger

Literary novel
Łukasz Barys
The Bones You Carry in Your Pocket

A debut that happens once in a decade

Publisher: Cyranka, Warszawa 2021
Translation rights: Wydawnictwo Cyranka, konrad@wydawnictwocyranka.pl

For a long time, Polish literature shied away from portraying reality, especially in its small-town variety. Luckily, a few fresh new voices have cropped up in recent years, reclaiming this reality that was so ignored by the mainstream. Łukasz Barys’s debut joins this trend, and is also one of its finest exponents.

At only twenty-four, this prose writer and poet (already lauded and awarded) takes readers on an unsentimental journey to his home town, Pabianice. Though Barys’s talent for language can call to mind magical realism (despite the prevailing greyness), the reality here is far from magical – decay, misery and death reign supreme. Our main protagonist is Ula, a student at the local middle school. She lives with her grandma, who has one foot in the grave, and her mother, who works as a cashier and keeps bringing home new “daddies”. She also takes care of her younger siblings. Cemeteries give her a moment’s respite, and her sense of connection with the dead lets her forget a bit about the lack of warmth at home. Ula’s story lets Barys address several issues that are key to today’s discourse (in and outside of literature): class divisions, poverty and exclusion, but also a teenager’s personal struggles with their body and family. The main asset in Barys’s novel is the language, which is poetic, packed with metaphors and literary and pop-culture references, and firmly rooted in today’s Polish and real speech; his gentle irony and wit allow him to disrupt the funereal tone a bit. Debuts like The Bones You Carry in Your Pocket happen once a decade in Polish literature. Łukasz Barys is now working on his second novel. All signs seem to show that the coming years will be his.

Krzysztof Cieślik

Translated by Soren Gauger

Selected samples

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Mateusz Żaboklicki
Anna Świrszczyńska
Mirka Szychowiak
Filip Matwiejczuk
Justyna Kulikowska
Urszula Kozioł
Kamila Janiak
Urszula Honek
Zuzanna Ginczanka
Darek Foks
Kacper Bartczak
Justyna Bargielska
Joanna Kuciel-Frydryszak
Maciej Robert
Michał Książek
Natalka Suszczyńska
Małgorzata Rejmer
Grzegorz Bogdał
Andrzej Chwalba
Renata Lis
Andrzej Stasiuk
Julia Łapińska
Aleksandra Tarnowska
Kajetan Szokalski
Aleksandra Koperda
Marta Hermanowicz
Ishbel Szatrawska
Monika Muskała
Elżbieta Łapczyńska
Łukasz Krukowski
Adam Kaczanowski
Agnieszka Jelonek
Mateusz Górniak
Anna Cieplak
Julita Deluga
Wojtek Wawszczyk, Tomasz Leśniak
121344
Anna Kańtoch
Andrzej Bobkowski
Wisława Szymborska
Zdzisław Kranodębski
Andrzej Nowak
Wiesław Myśliwski
Jarosław Jakubowski
Anna Piwkowska
Roman Honet
Miłosz Biedrzycki
Wojciech Chmielewski
Aleksandra Majdzińska
Tomasz Różycki
Maciej Hen
Jakub Nowak
Elżbieta Cherezińska
歐菈·沃丹斯卡-波欽斯卡(Ola Woldańska-Płocińska)
作者:沃伊切赫·維德瓦克(Wojciech Widłak), 插圖:亞歷珊德拉·克珊諾夫斯卡(Aleksandra Krzanowska)
文字:莫妮卡·烏特尼-斯特魯加瓦(Monika Utnik-Strugała), 概念和插圖:皮歐特·索哈(Piotr Socha)
作者:亞格涅絲卡·斯特爾馬什克(Agnieszka Stelmaszyk)
尤安娜·日斯卡(Joanna Rzyska)、阿嘉妲·杜德克(Agata Dudek)、瑪格熱妲·諾瓦克(Małgorzata Nowak) Druganoga出版社,華沙2021
艾麗莎·皮歐特夫斯卡(Eliza Piotrowska)
米科瓦伊·帕辛斯基(Mikołaj Pasiński)、瑪格熱妲·赫爾巴(Gosia Herba)
歐菈·沃丹斯卡-波欽斯卡(Ola Woldańska-Płocińska)
瑪麗安娜·奧克雷亞克(Marianna Oklejak)
拉法爾·科希克(Rafał Kosik)
亞歷珊德拉·沃丹斯卡-波欽斯卡(Aleksandra Woldańska-Płocińska)
巴托米耶·伊格納邱克(Bartłomiej Ignaciuk), 阿嘉塔·洛特-伊格納邱克(Agata Loth-Ignaciuk)
文字和插圖:皮歐特·卡爾斯基(Piotr Karski)
文字和插圖:皮歐特·卡爾斯基(Piotr Karski)
羅珊娜·延澤耶夫斯卡-弗魯貝爾 (Roksana Jędrzejewska-Wróbel)
作者:普舎米斯瓦夫·維赫特洛維奇(Przemysław Wechterowicz) 插圖:艾米莉·吉烏巴克(Emilia Dziubak)
尤斯提娜·貝納雷(Justyna Bednarek) 插圖:丹尼爾·德拉圖爾(Daniel De Latour)
尤安娜·巴托西克(Joanna Bartosik)
瑪格熱妲·斯文多夫斯卡(Małgorzata Swędrowska)、尤安娜·巴托西克(Joanna Bartosik)
Jan Kochanowski
Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz
Olga Tokarczuk
Władysław Stanisław Reymont
An Ancient Tale
Stanisław Rembek
Elżbieta Cherezińska
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Maria Dąbrowska
Stefan Żeromski
Bronisław Wildstein
Zbigniew Herbert / Wisława Szymborska
Karol Wojtyła
Wiesław Myśliwski
Czesław Miłosz
Anna Świrszczyńska / Melchior Wańkowicz
Tadeusz Borowski / Gustaw Herling-Grudziński
Wiesław Helak
Góra Tabor
Adriana Szymańska
Paweł Rzewuski
Mariusz Staniszewski
Staniszewski_Kartel
Radek Rak
Agla
Urszula Honek
Honek
Kazimierz Orłoś
Orlos
Rafał Wojasiński
Tefil
Antonina Grzegorzewska
Grzegorzewska_drama
Józef Mackiewicz
Mackiewicz_Sprawa
Tobiasz Piątkowski, Marek Oleksicki
Piatkowski_Oleksicki_Ekspozytura
Daniel Odija
Bronisław Wildstein
Józef Mackiewicz
Mackiewicz_Droga
Józef Mackiewicz
Mackiewicz_Bunt-rojstow
Witold Szabłowski
Szablowski_Rosja-od-kuchni
Andrzej Muszyński
Muszynski_Dom-ojcow
Wiesław Helak
Helak
Bartosz Jastrzębski
Jastrzebski_Dies-irae
Dariusz Sośnicki
Sośnicki_Po-domu
Łukasz Orbitowski
Orbitowski_chodz
Jakub Małecki
Malecki_SO
אנדז'יי ספקובסקי
Elżbieta Cherezińska
Wiesław Myśliwski
Jakub Małecki
Aleksandra Lipczak
Jacek Dukaj
Wit Szostak
Bartosz Biedrzycki
Zyta Rudzka
Maciej Płaza
Wojciech Chmielewski
Paweł Huelle
Przemysław "Trust" Truściński
Angelika Kuźniak
Wojciech Kudyba
Michał Protasiuk
Stanisław Rembek
Rembek
Krzysztof Karasek
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Artur Daniel Liskowacki
Jarosław Jakubowski
Zbigniew Stawrowski
Szczepan Twardoch
Wojciech Chmielarz
Robert Małecki
Zygmunt Miłoszewski
Anna Piwkowska
Dominika Słowik
Wojciech Chmielewski
Barbara Banaś
Rafał Mikołajczyk
Jerzy Szymik
Waldemar Bawołek
Julia Fiedorczuk
Jakub Szamałek
Witold Szabłowski
Jacek Dukaj
Grzegorz Górny, Janusz Rosikoń
Paweł Piechnik
Andrzej Strumiłło

69

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