I Burn Paris, a novel by the Polish Futurist and communist Bruno Jasieski (1901-38), is a strange, fascinating and at times rambling adventure in which the reader is asked not so much to suspend her disbelief as to hang it from the nearest electrical wire and watch the sparks fly.
Soren A. Gauger and Marcin Piekoszewski's translation is the first time I Burn Paris has been brought into English and it thus fills a void for scholars and lovers of Polish literature and Futurism; this is a significant work from one of the movement's most outspoken and tragic characters.
The novel is kaleidoscopic, following a handful of protagonists in Paris as the city's water supply is poisoned with a highly contagious virus that kills almost everyone in its wake. Chaos ensues, after which several factions split Paris between the Anglo-Americans, the Soviets, the Asians and several other ethnic groups, all of whom are antagonistic toward each other and even more so as the food supply begins to run out.
But this spine of a narrative is just that, a point of focus around which this novel turns, spinning in several directions at once and often going off on long tangents in which new characters are introduced and old ones forgotten. In the end, however, I Burn Paris coalesces into a fantastical vision of a post-apocalyptic world in which Jasieski's ideologies of choice rise to power.
I Burn Paris By Bruno Jasieski Translated by Soren A. Gauger and Marcin Piekoszewski Twisted Spoon Press 309 pages
In proper Futurist fashion, Jasieski's writing style takes no prisoners. There is a constant forward momentum in the novel, a constant energy that bubbles to the surface even as the story meanders in seemingly tangential directions. His use of similes, surely the most pyrotechnic of a writer's tools, puts an uncanny spin on quotidian urban events, even as they endow these events with neon vividness.
Describing a windy day, Jasieski writes: "A violent northwest wind blew in Lyon that day, and shredded scraps of fog flapped like wet underwear on invisible clotheslines. Wind-tossed hats flapped in the air like heavy birds, and headless pedestrians hopped strangely after them like rubber balls."
In most writers' hands, such a faith in the ability of metaphor and simile to lift an everyday event out of the realm of the simply everyday could quickly turn cloying, but Jasieski uses his similes more like firecrackers in this discursive novel that feels longer than it actually is, in part because so much of what happens is completely unexpected.
Yet despite Jasieski's uncanny eye for the odd detail, he also captures some of the bare facts of urban life with a startling energy and imagination. As a Futurist, Jasieski was concerned - not to say obsessed - with technology and modernity. Appropriately, then, his description of something as inconsequential as typists working at their machines turns into a paean to technology.
"The electricity burned bright in the print rooms of the workers' daily; the linotypes clattered and the tar-covered typesetters galloped the equine fingers of their calloused hands across the tiny cobblestones of the keys like strange virtuosi. The levers and scatterbrained letters now leapt up, now dropped, like soldiers instantly falling into line. The fingers flashed once more across the steps of the keyboard. Again, one after another, the letters climbed like acrobats along the lines, along the scaffolding of the levers, and moments later plunged headfirst into the bubbling pool ..."
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