Zal

by Paul Ericson

When asked if the camera can lie, the photographer Walker Evans “Always.” For the narrator of Zal (pronounced "zhahl"), the greater problem was self-deception. The story unfolds in the forty-eight hours preceding the 1981 crackdown by the Communist regime in Poland, as the narrator – a free-lance photojournalist documenting the era of Solidarnosc – searches for Marta, the enigmatic student he’d met months earlier in Krakow. Interwoven are other recollections – reaching back to his youth and forward to 1991, a decade after martial law in Poland abruptly altered the course of history. By turns haunting and hopeful, gritty and comic, Zal is a novel of words and images, memory and regret.

304 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 11, 2011