Szum

A woman looks back on a girlhood in communist-era Warsaw, in a family that guarded its secrets and lurched from yelling to dead quiet, and tries once more to reach her distant mother. As a child she never found the right volume to speak at, and her odd habits, aimless bus rides across the city and sleeping by day, earned her the mockery of teachers and classmates. Women run this family: a forceful aunt, a cousin raised in her shadow who must always come out on top, a mother who keeps her distance, while the Italian father stays on the edges. The past nobody tells her about seems made only of dates from newspapers, and from a book brought back from Milan the girl conjures up an SS man and a talking fox, whom she quizzes about a world she can hardly believe is real.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

188 pages in the original

Genres

Autofiction, Family (assigned by AI)

First published

2014 by Znak

Author's age

59 when first published

ISBN

9788324026258 (original)