Dreams and Stones

by Magdalena Tulli, Bill Johnston (Translator)

Dreams and Stones is a small masterpiece, one of the most extraordinary works of literature to come out of Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of communism. In sculpted, poetic prose reminiscent of Bruno Schulz, it tells the story of the emergence of a great city. In Tulli’s hands myth, metaphor, history, and narrative are combined to magical effect. Dreams and Stones is about the growth of a city, and also about all cities; at the same time it is not about cities at all, but about how worlds are created, trans- formed, and lost through words alone. A stunning debut by one of Europe’s finest new writers.

Genres: Fiction, Polish Literature, Poland, Poetry, Literary Fiction, 20th Century, Literature

110 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

In 1995 Magdalena Tulli got Kościelscy Award. She was shortlisted for the NIKE Award two times. Her books were translated to English, German, French, Czech, Hungarian and Latvian. She is a member of Polish Writers Society. In 2007 she got a special award - distinction of Gdynia Literary Award.

She translated a few books: The anger of heaven by Fleur Jaeggy (for this translation from Italian she received the award of Literature of the world magazine), Amerigo's long day by Italo Calvino and Lost by Marcel Proust.

Reviews

[Ilse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prey to longing and doubt, every night the unquiet city of recollections releases dreams – enchanting adhesive shoots that seek support in silence and darkness.

As a lover of modernist writing and aesthetics, I do not tend easily to fiction obviously labelled as postmodernist. However, I cannot remember ever having read anything as mind-blowing as this Polish post-communist author before. Quite unexpectedly, the ingenuity and beauty of the fragmented, surrealistic narrative and the bifurcating of time and place into multiple realities and possibilities, intrigued and enthralled me.

Plenty of Tulli’s imagery and metaphors are stunningly beautiful, though I am aware a great deal of their meaning didn’t unveil for me at a first reading. The density of her prose runs over the reader like a steamroller, and leaves the reader out of breath, too dazzled to seize all the meanings, connotations and layers in this collage dashed with paradoxes. Her prose is tinged with memorable sentences and passages:

Where is that vast left-luggage office containing plush teddy bears that belonged to soldiers, the happy moments of abandoned women, the fortunes of bankrupts, the kisses of those run over by trams, the reflections of sunsets in windowpanes, finished melodies and eaten tarts?

The focal point of Dreams and Stones is the (re)design and (re) building of the City, unnamed, but probably identifiable as Warsaw, taking up the few pointers Tulli drops (“It would seem unlikely that a name of such a city would include so many Ws and As at once,” echoing its Polish name Warzawa). The Warsaw indication helps to root the story in the real history of Poland and its capital, recalling Warzaw’s razing to the ground into ‘a sea of rubble’ by special Nazi troops mid-January 1945, the ultimate devastation of a city already almost wiped from the surface of the earth in the aftermath of the Ghetto Uprising in April 1943 and the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944. The ‘bricks for Warsaw’ campaign to build a New, Socialist Capital involved literally the whole nation, with donations and workers coming from all around Poland.

Tulli blows live into the famous socialist realist architectural sculpture adorning the edifices in Warsaw, movingly portraying the love and hope the workers put in the bas-reliefs decorating the façades, and in their new lives.


Reconstruction works in the Old Town in Gołębia Street (today Piwna 6), 1953, photo: Zbyszko Siemaszko / Dom Spotkań z Historią

Her imaginary city however not wholly coincides with Warsaw, as a plethora of cities, depicted distortedly, but with familiar names like Paris, Petersburg, Milan, New York, Odessa, are all encompassed in the novel’s city, simultaneously, as mirages. And there are the perpetual past and ‘memory’s submerged theater’: Past events leave traces in the memory like an ax chopping wood.

Unlike every other novel I have read so far, this story doesn’t depend on any character at all. Even without individual characters - even not minimally sketched – to discern or sympathize with, the thoughts and dreams of the inhabitants of Tulli’s world accomplish to commit the reader emotionally and although represented in an abstract and generalized tone, go straight to the reader’s heart. Emotions inundate her world, like ours:

Sorrow and joy in the city change just like the weather: slip in: p 46 no one knows where sorrow comes from in a city. It has no foundations; it is not built of bricks or screwed together from threaded pipes; it does not flow through electric cables nor is it brought by cargo trains. Sorrow drifts amongst the apartment buildings like a fine mist that the wind blows unevenly across the streets, squares and courtyard. Here and there a small point of joy appears and a zone of joy begins to expand in wedges down streets enveloped in sorrow; its advance parts pass over the roofs of buildings like an atmospheric front.

The parable-like tale of the (re)building and life cycle of the socialist city, a living organism, in accordance with the new ideology , is a vehicle to touch on a multitude of philosophical and political themes worth exploring, themes which are presented dichotomically (tree versus machine, life versus death, real versus imaginary, cause versus effect, stones versus dreams, order versus chaos, city-counter-city). It seems to me that Tulli is playfully referring to and constantly shifting between dialectical idealism (Hegel) and dialectical materialism (Marx). Is the city ruled by the dreams of the inhabitants? Or is the material world ruling the minds? Is the world of ideas, the realm of dreams, responsible for, is it cause of, whatever order occurs in the material world? For Tulli, neither the world of substances, neither the world of ideas, is stable or permanent.

Does those dialecticisms breathe a certain nostalgia for the postwar communist time? Yes and no. As the city’s (re)buiding and (impossible) maintenance is suggestively paralleled with the rise and decay of Communism and its design of society, there is a certain flavor of nostalgia for the communist infancy stage, not for the further developments leading to the implosion of the system. Through the disordering of the city, Tulli describes poignantly the reaction of withdrawal from the communist ideals when the deceptive reality and deteriorating quality of life becomes visible. Losing hope, feeling like the wrong breed, an error in urban planning in this perfect city and society, the inhabitants come to see themselves like an ‘interim species’, disheartened to save the collapsing system:

That which one can bump into and hurt oneself on from a certain perspective is more real than the than the fleeting landscapes seen by a gaze turned in on the interior of the memory.

This slender novel is a brilliant hymn to human imagination: "It is possible to imagine a city perfect in its entirety, a city that is the sum of all possibilities". Tree or machine? Novel or prose poem? Postmodernist fiction or enchanting fairy-tale? It is totally up to you, reader. Do not take the ground under your feet for granted. Perhaps, as Tulli translated Calvino into Polish, Invisible Cities would be a good next read now.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Archipelago Books for giving me the opportunity to read this work and getting to know this wonderful writer.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cities as imagined reality, or real imaginations
If you're up for an awkward reading experience, I can absolutely recommend this book: it's short, but offers an inimitable chain of reflections on what cities stand for. The Polish writer 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 Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino also come into the picture, which inevitably puts Tulli in the postmodern corner. But I would like to add another reference: the phenomenal graphic series Les Cités obscures : Livre 1 by the Belgian duo François Schuiten and Benoit Peeters, in which they bring the most bizarre cities to life in both drawings and texts. It almost seems to me that Tulli has extracted some of her descriptions and reflections 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 each in themselves are a microcosm, anchored both in the real as well as in the imaginary world. A fantastic analysis of this book can be found here.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had no idea what I was getting into when I began Dreams and Stones (by Magdalena Tulli). I had read comparisons to Invisible Cities and Bruno Schulz but I was still unprepared for the beauty of the dream that is this book.

At first I struggled to make sense of the book only to discover that when I let go of forcing sense upon it, the book began to make its own kind of sense. It is a prose poem describing the city that is the world and the countercity-the darkness and disorder we try to push away, and ignore that makes itself known by destroying the false order we impose upon life. There is the question of questions: hollow ones that destroy and genuine, authentic ones that support life.

This book makes a lot of sense in thinking about the world, what we hunger for, what we think is real or satisfying, but it goes beyond that. Like any poem, it pushes us beyond daytime reason into another nighttime world of dreams-and sometimes nightmares.

Once I read a few pages, I couldn't stop until I finished the whole work. It's like reading one long complex sentence that includes the world (although I'm grateful it is not one sentence!) or one thought that much be thought through to its end.

I thank NetGalley and Archipelego books for giving me the opportunity to read this work.

[Antonomasia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A niche, tiny novelette about a city, or the idea of cities. The whole narrative is made up of the kind of wide-angle description of place, or of people in the collective, which in conventional novels precedes a zoom in towards named human characters. The reflex to anticipate imminent character and story throughout the book made this the reading equivalent of hearing one of those music tracks that seems to be wholly made up of introductions. The book's intense, sometimes metaphysical, involvement with city as organic entity, its use of the passive voice, and its panoramas of people as types and generalities, often reminded me of descriptive passages in the London psychogeographies of Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair.

Several other posters have described Dreams and Stones as prose-poetry. To me, this is unquestionably prose, no more poetic than that of many good novelists, but there is poetic licence here in repurposing facts and ideas to transmit the feel of something, rather than making analogies which are strictly factually correct. This brought to mind the quibbles several reviewers had with inaccurate 'information' mentioned in this year's Booker International winner Flights by Tulli's fellow Pole, Olga Tokarczuk.

The first of two parts (about 1/3 of Dreams and Stones) appears to be focused on an ideal city (and the endeavours to suppress darker sides dubbed 'the countercity'), and the Soviet Communist idea of the perfectibility of man. The narrative feels orderly by comparison with the second part, and while reading it, I frequently imagined Soviet-style propaganda posters, and similar images from Andrzej Wajda's Man of Marble - although ultimately that orderliness begins to fray into chaos.

The second part seems somewhat more fluid, emotive and diffuse, and uses the imagery of the kaleidoscope and its crystals to connect scenes. Some are scenes of the book's 'home' city (evidently Warsaw - identifiable by the mentions of the letters W and A in its name, and a palace with a spire that is disliked by residents, i.e. the Soviet-built Pałac Kultury) - and there are also series of caricature images of other cities, in Western Europe and North America, and in Russia. (The well-intentioned use of regional and national stereotypes felt to me not unlike that of American children's author Richard Scarry.) Perhaps some of these arrays of foreign cities can be seen as a post-Communist opening-up to the world - the book was published in 1995 - while the places themselves still remain relatively unreal as many Poles would not yet have travelled a great deal.

These cartoonish images of cities abroad are the main source of humour in a largely serious-minded, sometimes ethereal book:
Is it possible that Paris really exists – a place with a name so pretentious it makes one laugh? Or London, which was essentially conceived as fog? Manchester and Liverpool are two soccer fields with coal tips instead of stands. Bordeaux is a mountain in the shape of a bottle; Rotterdam, Antwerp and the Hague are the names of flea-ridden sailing ships rocking against the quay, their holds filled with spices and silk. Venice is in reality a mother-of-pearl gondola in which is concealed a music box. Chicago is a place filled with suitcases of money where gangsters in felt hats live, shoot guns and die. New York crammed the tallest skyscrapers in the world into an area six inches long and four and a half wide; on the other side there is a box for a postage stamp.

Knowing less about provincial Russia, I was intrigued by the following:
They began to wander aimlessly about St. Petersburg, great in its golden frame, where beneath the shiny varnish it is dark in the winter for as much as twenty hours a day. Or Moscow, where the streets were paved with wood that may have been real or may have been made from lacquered building blocks. They even traveled as far as Tula, which was tall and had a brass tap to let out boiling water, and also to Omsk and Tomsk, where in the summertime they float wood down the river and in winter they are chilled to the marrow. And to Astrakhan – that storehouse of ice and skins – where caviar is eaten by the spoonful and champagne drunk straight from the bottle. At the feet of a good few of these lost travelers, somewhere at the meeting point of steppe and sea there opened up a dark abyss by the name of Odessa, filled with sailors, bandits, officers and femmes fatales, washed over beyond salvation by waves of epidemics and filled forever with the echo of shots. Some did not stop till Baku, where blood flows like rainwater in the streets, or Khabarovsk, where White Army soldiers without boots lie on the white snow. Or Vladivostok, that last station in the world, toward which tracks that previously ran straight as an arrow begin to describe the first loop of a spiral. The next loop rests on Harbin, where Chinese in felt shoes wade through snowdrifts..

The connections between different scenes and themes is always beautifully done, and everything flowed seamlessly. This second section sometimes toys with physics concepts prevalent in 90s pop-culture, like the butterfly effect and parallel universes, with an intent that is evidently poetic rather than scientific.

This is clearly not a book for everyone, as it has neither human characters nor plot in a remotely conventional sense, but it is very short (likely taking under 2 hours for many literary fiction readers) and if you enjoy films of time-lapse photography and panoramic scenes, or extended god's-eye-view descriptions of cities, you may like it.

This was the first book I've read by contemporary Polish author Magdalena Tulli. Archipelago Press, and top-notch translator Bill Johnson are fans of hers and have published several of her works in English. Her books appear inviting as very quick reads, given their brevity, but this one seems typical in being experimental and idea-driven (and so only quick at times when one is alert and up for reading that sort of thing).

[Alta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tulli’s Dreams and Stones, a work half prose poem half narrative, is reminiscent of Kafka’s parables in that the story seems to be telling much more than its surface lets appear; and it is reminiscent of Schulz in its unbound imagination and metaphoric associations. But its theme is very remote from the concerns that the two Jewish writers had at the time when they lived and wrote. It is a theme which in today’s academic circles is described as nature versus culture or nature versus technology. A theme which in the same circles has been dressed in a jargon entirely absent from Tulli’s book—for like any true creation, Dreams and Stones creates its own language as it re-creates the world. And because we often perceive things only in the shell we are accustomed to, we may fail to see what this book “is about.” Tulli’s countrymen say it is about a city, namely Warsaw, and they are probably right in a certain way. But for those of us who do not know Warsaw, the book is no less vivid: the city it describes is not only Warsaw, but any city, a mythical city whose history replicates the history of civilization and the intricate relation between nature and artifact residing at the core of all societies.

Knowing that Tulli has translated Italo Calvino into Polish also reminds us that Calvino is the author of Invisible Cities, a collection of fable-like tales, whose narrator takes us through the labyrinth of the numerous cities he has passed through, all with names of women, all elusive and desirable as the women whose names they wear. Like for Calvino, for Tulli, cities are living organisms, and any city worthy of the name is sustained by a unifying thread, by a certain perspective or discourse.

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A hypercompressed psychogeography. The universe in a grain of dust. All of our teeming, chaotic dreams of order and harmony, and the silent persistence of stone.

[Mandy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Polish author Magdalena Tulli has written several acclaimed works and garnered enthusiastic praise from readers and critics alike. But if this book is typical of her writing then she isn’t an author for me. More of a prose-poem than a novel, it’s a plot-less and character-less description, full of imagery and metaphor, of a city, or perhaps of all cities. I found it a struggle to read and wasn’t at all captivated by it as many others seem to have been. The writing may well be lyrical and perhaps the deeper meanings have escaped me, but basically I was bored and unengaged.

[Wiktoria · Rating 2 out of 5]

⭐️2.5
Piękny język, ale niesamowicie ciężko mi się czytało. Wydawało mi się, jakby zdania się ze sobą nie łączyły i nie tworzyły spójnego sensu.

[Farhan Khalid · Rating 4 out of 5]

The cities that ripen on the tree of the world are enclosed in shape like apples

The world had only just emerged from its primordial chaos

In those happy times all future days seemed altogether fresh and tidily arranged, like young leaves that have not yet emerged from the bud

The growth of a city in many respects resembles the growth of a tree

A city too grows through power and faith

The world is a machine

Each object in the world is linked to its counterobject and all that is visible is connected with something invisible

Expressions “it is a tree” and “it is not a tree” in essence mean the same thing

Beauty served no practical purpose

Because of the existence of all these interpenetrating spaces a city becomes ever more confused, entangled, diffuse

It has to be simultaneously dark and light, crowded and deserted, noisy and soundless

The fragile lustrous substance that the stars were made of lost its transparent quality after the collisions and rained down on the city as a black dust

No one knows where sorrow comes from in a city

Sorrow drifts amongst the apartment buildings like a fine mist

Roof tiles has its own peculiar shade of sorrow

Sorrow is what enthusiasm becomes when its explosion passes its highest point, after which implosion inevitably follows

Without rules life is lived in an intolerable uncertainty

Thoughts and imaginings, unlike walls, can be seen without opening one’s eyes

Objects and buildings circulate randomly and mingle with one another

Rome is a point to which all roads lead:

It is precisely because of the pressure of missed possibilities that the city begins to generate mirages: the gold of Prague, the mystery of Milan, the colonial architecture of Montevideo

There people went to bed in the evening; here they will get up in the morning

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

Changes are the only trace that time leaves

The stage of the memory is equipped with panoramas rolled up beneath the ceiling, fleeting landscapes seen by a gaze turned in on the interior of the memory

The city woven from changes is a stage for perpetual entrances and exits that deteriorates a little more with every day, the black chasm of sleep without dreams

THIS CITY WAS BUILT AT THE MEETING POINT OF THREE ELEMENTS in a place where they mingled with one another. It was constructed on the clay of memories, on the sands of dreams and on the ground waters of oblivion

Words move, now here now there, dragging thoughts, questions and desires behind them

In these days of the world’s old age everyone here is alone, and everyone has their own city

The crushing pressure of thoughts that make the head throb with pain will in the end reveal a light, transparent void. May that void unfold inside every brick and permeate everything in the world: buildings, sun and stars, clouds in the sky, air in the lungs and the lungs themselves

The burden oppressing us weighs nothing at all

Story is not real, just like the tree and like us ourselves. But the life of stones, which has no care for the past or the future, existed and will continue to exist: a steadfast endurance free of any name

[Ariel · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[J.I.]

It staggers me that this book has been so well-received. I will certainly admit that the prose is often beautifully wrought in a marvelous poetic style, but after having read Invisible Cities (which Tulli translated), I cannot help but feel that Dreams and Stones feels redundant. It has many things to say about the concept of time, of life and the counter life and how they exist in concert with the other, of the argument of nature v technology (and how it is a false argument), etc., but its point is at best nebulous.

I said it feels redudant because Invisible Cities has dealt with similar themes such as time and life, nature and technology, with the hazards of names and the false belief of knowing, only Calvino did it with more wit and humor and the points felt sharper and more surprising and yet more charming. Tulli's novel has a few high points (such as when it goes on about how London might as well be constructed entirely of fog) which lead you to believe that it has simply taken its sweet time in overwhelming description, but then you are plunged back into the morass of desription.

Oh, there are points, there are things gotten at, the description itself is lovely and the attempt at a novel without characters is admirable, but in the end it simply doesn't work all that particularly well. Ask someone who loves this book what it is about and they will look at you like they are lost and then their eyes will roll to the back of their heads and they will rush out about the beautiful descriptions but their love will be without any true depth. They have just perfectly described this.

[Laurasmoot · Rating 4 out of 5]

staggering prose poetry i can only read in short bursts: "dreams and stones is about the growth of a city, and also about all cities; at the same time it is not about cities at all, but about how worlds are created, transformed, and lost through words alone." oh poland. tulli lives in warsaw where she works as a psychologist and translator.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

An original, haunting urban cosmology this book is also a sorrowful tribute to Warsaw. Review to come, Quarterly Conversation, Fall 2016.
Update: My review can be found here: http://quarterlyconversation.com/drea...

[Sookie · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are multiple stories out there that depict cities, buildings, and all the structures that make a community a city, but here, Magdalena Tulli, writes about a community that makes a city to operate as a machine and also as a living organism. "its a tree" "and its not a tree", some people say, she writes. And this encompasses the narrative she spins through this tiny novella. Its a short book which takes on a journey into city's dreamscape, and exposes, very cheekily the (hopes) and dreams of the people who inhabit. She writes about those places of perfection - those that exist in those small pockets of time in those fleeting moments where it all seemed perfect. But there was a war, a regime change, a revolution, a new war, a blasted civil reform and so it goes.

its a brilliant book, no doubt, the communism aspect of it isn't always thinly veiled. But for a novella, it can get repetitive and tiny bit exhausting. perhaps that's exactly what the intent was and that's something i couldn't enjoy.

[Liam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was one difficult read: a prose poem with no plot or characters; with just a narrator that elucidates the reality and unreality of human life, objects, history, and memory through the semi-focused lens of city planning (with allusions to a Polish city being rebuilt in Communism following the destruction of WW2). The writing demands focus from its readers, as its dense, ambiguous, and steeped with metaphor and symbolism. This book is a showcase of a brilliant author having a vision and going all out to attain it, with little qualms if her readers are unable to follow along. For my reading experience that came with both good and bad: when I was there with her the sentences could be enrapturing, whereas sometimes full pages and paragraphs were impenetrable to me and I was completely lost.

I probably respected this book more than I enjoyed it, but it's certainly an impressive work by a very talented writer so I still found reading it worthwhile. Though I'd be curious to try Tulli's more traditional novels.

[syrinxelite · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.3
Niepodzielne prawo, wyłączna nieodpowiedź. Na co, jeżeli nie na ciszę?
Pocieszający drobiazg, lecz natężony. Bardzo wiele trzeźwości jest w snach. I kamieniach.

[Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

刚开始是有共鸣的，但渐渐被这种过于冰冷机械的东西冲淡了。在描写城市建筑与居民嵌套一般繁复的构成之下，我想其中的核心我们现在也能感知到，但不会再用这样的写法。太过于符合我的预期，在钢铁骨架之间人们的思维逸散，半透明暗沉的氛围，以至于有点无味了。反倒是后半程更贴近那种无形却又在边界尝试的被束缚下的自由，关于字词与思想，那些毁灭重建与记忆忘却，当下去看这样的文字又像在已经模糊斑驳无法捕捉的东西里去寻找回忆。

[Mila Stróżyk · Rating 2 out of 5]

Zmęczyłam się, dobrze że pdf miał tylko 33 strony

[echo · Rating 2 out of 5]

zastanawiam się, co mi nie zagrało w tej książce, bo uważam ją za obiektywnie piękną, z intrygującą koncepcją, narracją jak w filmie dokumentalnym „Sans soleil” i konsekwentnie rozwijanymi obrazami, ale mimo wszystko zdarzenia związane z życiem miasta-podmiotu uciekały przede mną, miałem ochotę przeskakiwać całe partie tekstu, czekając na coś, może na pozwolenie na wstęp do tego świata, który mimo wszystko nadal oglądałem z zewnątrz

[Rosenkavalier · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jak się topić, to się topić

La postfazione avverte che il traduttore americano ha definito Sogni e pietre un poema in prosa.
Ottimo lavoro.
In effetti, questo libro solo apparentemente minuscolo (stampato da Voland con zelo ambientalista: non c'è un mm2 di spazio bianco nelle pagine) non ha nulla del romanzo, se non una storia peraltro solo labilmente ricostruibile.
La realizzazione di una città, dai primordi della civiltà ai giorni nostri, è l'occasione per una serie di immagini, metafore, simboli messi in fila con una densità che soffoca.
I progettisti, i costruttori, gli uomini e la pietra, gli uomini di pietra, gli uomini che non capiscono la pietra.
La scelta del mezzo si è, con ogni probabilità, semplicemente rivelata troppo complessa perchè l'autrice, qui esordiente, la potesse maneggiare. E si è schiantata.
A me ha fatto pensare a Thomas Eliot e alla sua Terra desolata, prima dell'intervento di Ezra Pound. Sarebbe servito anche qui un miglior fabbro, che riducesse l'opera a una misura più idonea a un'esordiente.

[Per un vero esperimento di arte totale sul tema delle città ideali, prendo sempre e comunque il folle progetto New Babylon di Constant, al secolo Constant Nieuwenhuys, 15 anni di vita a pensare, teorizzare, disegnare, modellizzare una città impossibile]

Insomma, l'idea era interessante, lo svolgimento è alterno. Il libriccino è disseminato di frasi o, forse, versi bellissimi, alternati a passaggi che a me sono parsi illeggibili. Inoltre, questa cosa che la modernità sarebbe tutta una decadenza, rispettosamente, avrebbe anche stancato.

Peccato, perchè ci sono vere perle, ad esempio il passo in cui si parla delle stazioni ferroviarie e dei loro tabelloni delle partenze, dove "spuntano parole insolite e belle che fanno lacrimare un po' gli occhi". Oppure quello su vecchie foto di famiglia ingiallite con "Nessuno che sa che fine abbia fatto l'amore che conferiva una sfumatura calda agli sguardi color seppia".

Ma come ha fatto la stessa che ha scritto

"Forse tutto ciò di cui abbiamo bisogno è un caos ancora più grande di desideri sempre ardenti, di domande sempre più angosciose e di risposte sempre più vacue, il cui sorteggio sempre casuale - come un gioco d'azzardo senza premi - reca soltanto sofferenza"

a scrivere anche questo

"I più voraci in assoluto nell'assorbire energia erano gli impianti che separavano il caos dall'ordine, quelli che dividevano la controcittà dalla città".

Ma dai! Ma mi immagino come può suonare in polacco una roba così.
Ma poi io che ne so, tutta la mia esperienza col polacco si limita a questo
"

[Dziekuje]

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was sold on this little novella early on. The imagery, the competing threads of city as tree vs city as machine, the ideas of city and countercity, the language of the city, here growing organically and providing, here rotting from overzealous and unwise pruning... Tulli paints a picture here, tells a story that at turns feels like beauty and magic, and at others feels too dark and real and current. There is a love for the structures of society, and a fear of their inevitable seeming corruption.

My only wish? That I had approached this when I was more awake. The images washed over me and left a much bigger overall impression than a real memory. Which I suppose is appropriate in some way. But in a text that is so reliant on its own poetics, on its turns of phrases, on the HOW of the image created, I think it deserves another read. Certainly it's brief enough to do so.

This isn't a book for you if you're looking for an easily identified plot. It has no real characters, save for the washers and builders and some trams. It has no real action, though the story is continually moving... it's a time lapse more than a narrative. Come into it wanting the images and not a tale, and you'll be on more equal footing.

[Charlie Zoops · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this elegantly written prose poem, stretching a vast 110 pages, you will find a lushly descriptive city. The one Magdalena describes is reflective of all cities with historical and modern significance, but it is likely to be a derivative of Warsaw, a place both battered with destruction and infused with hope. Tulli encapsulates this city in a fabric of non-linear narratives that blend together into seamless constructions. Time overlaps itself with emotive ambitions, transportation system find railways into the capillaries of thoughts, and inhabiting bodies move as shadows into places of direction and confusion. From the stones beneath our feet, that ground us into our stable assurances, to the dreams above that evoke our highest inventions, there lies a city, a beautiful place which constructs the matter far beyond our understanding, but a place that still holds dear to our strongest human desire to live amidst it's remarkable allure.

[Mag · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Nicholas · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love Schulz and I love Kis' Garden & Ashes. Unfortunately, this book only maintains a form of poetry/prose without engagement. I'm sure there is some cosmic, metaphysical enlightenment to be reconciled but either the translator or the author's prose and poetry is not that good. I was told I might like this because I believe this type of art can be the bulwark of a novel, but with an honest conscious I could not recommend this to anyone unless they want a poorly composed fever dream about the growth and dearth of humanity.

[Nora Rawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I couldn't finish this one. It's very beautiful, very dream-like, but its dream logic was impossible to follow, and I couldn't make progress after a certain point--I just kept re-reading the same paragraphs. For style lovers, or urban planners of a particular bent, it might be ideal, but I needed something more concrete as a foothold.

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very abstract, basically just non-stop (but not single sentence) description of a surreal city and its inhabitants. No dialog, no individual characters. These things make it a less than simple read, but it has a lot of interesting imagery and stuff to think about.

[Guy Aridor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hauntingly beautiful

[Alexander Asay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tulli’s opening image, the “tree of the world” with its counter-tree growing in darkness, sets the tone: every surface has its underside, every creation carries its ruin within it. From this seed she builds cities that sprout like fruit, encased in scaffolding and lime dust, rising on faith rather than knowledge. The book moves through registers of the geometry of right angles, the labyrinth of meanders, the radiating clarity of stars, each a principle of urban design that governs not just streets but human thought and fate.

As buildings rise, so do the machines, tramlines, smokestacks, and newspapers, all powered by belief in progress. Momentum accelerates to exhaustion: days consumed before they arrive, factories working without pause, paper printed and trashed the same day. Eventually the system collapses into fatigue, the slowing gears, the city’s sorrow drifting like mist across its streets, the recognition that “any thing could be replaced with some other thing” and meaning itself dissolves.

The prose is relentless, often without paragraph break, repeating and circling until images blur into systems with palaces filled with mirrors, streets that generate sorrow, train stations whose names promise destinations that never quite exist.

Those looking for characters or a story-line will come up empty; what remains is the city itself, treated at once as subject, setting, and instrument. Yet for readers willing to give in to its dream logic, Dreams and Stones becomes less a novel than a meditation on how worlds are built and undone, how faith and labor hold matter together until entropy takes it apart.

[Chris]

A beautiful, dense, prose poem about the tree of the world and the machinery of the city, about hopes and dreams and disappointments.
A work with erudite observations, surreal similes and metaphors, and, alas, a few cliches.
There were times, I admit, when my attention wasn't up to the passages I read. I look forward to reading this again.

[Maria do Socorro Baptista · Rating 3 out of 5]

Um longo poema em prosa sobre o crescimento de uma cidade, que poderia ser qualquer cidade. Não é bem o tipo de leitura que me cativa, mas há passagens muito interessantes, e o espírito poético é muito forte. Faria um bom contraponto com as teorias que lidam com a questão do espaço urbano na literatura. Interessante.