Century 21

by Ewa Kuryluk

Century 21, a time machine in literary form, ignores the unity of time, space, and character. This tragicomical idyll of the future past mixes ancient and modern genres: Platonic dialogue and nineteenth-century romance, reportage and science fiction. At the book's core are two sisters, Ann Kar, a writer and survivor, and Carol, a suicidal artist. Considering herself a lunatic, Carol dreams about escaping from the earth to the moon (luna) and about the moon scholar, a lunar archeologist, who a thousand years after her death, while reconstructing terrestrial life, discovers the traces of her existence, falls in love with her, and begins to write about her - and his - erotic adventure. The result is a novel where Anna Karenina writes about Simone Weil, where Joseph Conrad meets Malcolm Lowry in Mexico, where Goethe presides over a literary institute made up of such members as Italo Svevo and Sextus Propertius, and where Djuna Barnes, dying from AIDS, visits Moses Maimonides in Japan. Ewa Kuryluk is fascinated by the repetition of the same situations and types, yet she's after her contemporaries who are starved for affection, lost in transit, ready to slip into somebody else's skin, and speaking in English, their second language, with a heavy accent. Century 21 is a profoundly moving and original work.

Genres: Polish Literature, Novels, Literature

330 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1992

About the author

Ewa Kuryluk, a well-known Polish writer, artist, and art historian, has been living in Manhattan since 1981 and writing in English since 1982.

She has been the recipient of the General Electric Award for Younger Writers, the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, the Rockefeller Fellowship at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship in Japan. Her art work has been exhibited all over the world.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another staggering dense impossible hilarious maddening insane longer-than-it-looks novel from the Dalkey catalogue. Kuryluk’s first (and only, it seems) novel in English, Century 21 is a mosaic novel blending fictional dialogues with Ancient Greeks, postcolonial European authors and a Moon scholar, along with long narrative threads told from obfuscated points of view, making the work an inscrutable ludic exercise in meaning.

An AIDS-ridden Djuna Barnes mingles with Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides in Manhattan, Malcolm Lowry baits Joseph Conrad’s attempt to Anglicise his works and erase his Polish identity. The Ancient Greeks go on at length in effusive tracts bordering on the maniacal, among them Latin poet Propertius and Ptolemaic Queen Berenice. The novel abandons, as says the blurb, the unities of time, so all these people orbit each other’s narrative strands, the Latin poets popping up in modern day New York. All sense of where, what and why is nowhere to be seen, though the novel builds its own internal sense somewhere down the line, partly since Kuryluk’s prose is outstanding.

A triumph of style, shifting narrative voices and esoteric academic wankery, Kuryluk demonstrates a mastery of language in a book dense with allusions, references, Latin and German and Italian quotes, and inherently absurd situations rife with high-brow comedy. Another tough, dazzling and original work form the Dalkey staple, fated to rot in obscurity.

[Brandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though it loses a bit of momentum in the second half as the permutations of historical and literary/fictional characters conversing reaches a limit of effectiveness, Century 21 still feels like a reward for reading too many books, and the thread/framing device (which I’ll leave the reader to discover because it’s highly enjoyable) really ties up brilliantly in the end. I’m simply appreciative of Kuryluk taking the time to guide me through the literature section of her vast knowledge of history and art and human nature (three deeply connected, interdependent realms). I imagine lots of writers have thought of creating this type of novel in some form, and several have published something with thematic similarities (Markson, Arno Schmidt, Julian Rios come to mind likely because I’ve read them fairly recently), but few are successful at creating a fully formed original work like Century 21. Respect for the cover featuring the author’s own work.