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Part travel writing, part philosophical essay, this short book sets two places against each other. Morocco, where the author returns again and again, shows itself in small scenes: tea poured with ceremony, a stallholder taking a stranger's elbow to point the way, a peculiar light, the severed heads of goats. Chechnya appears only in traces found in Poland, elsewhere in Europe and across the Caucasus, above all in the war stories of Islam, a Chechen met in Poland, who warns that another war is on its way. Between them come a grasshopper the author, as a boy, watched suffer in a glass jar, and the eighteenth-century traveller Jan Potocki, who serves as a guide to strangeness. Written, the author says, for boys growing up, it asks what accepting the world's cruelty means.

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About the book

Form

Nonfiction

Length

106 pages in the original

Genres

War (assigned by AI)

Set in

Russia, Morocco

First published

2016 by Wydawnictwo Czarne

Author's age

57 when first published

ISBN

9788380493353 (original)