Antoni Libera

Antoni Libera creates a young man as the narrator of Madame. We meet him at school where his smart and dazzling French teacher is the infatuation of many of the young men. The Polish teenager is no exception and he sets himself the task to find out as much as he can about Madame. This experience takes him to many cultural events and gives him a glimpse of the adult world and changes him. Madame remains enigmatic throughout the novel with occasional sparks of humanity. When the narrative moves forward this is a charming and well-told novel of a young man coming of age in Communist era Poland but I found much of the high art that he describes inaccessible. We are given a young man who is clearly well read and intellectual and even precocious and I can see why these passages were perhaps necessary to paint this picture but they made the book somewhat saturated with words. The novel is an excellent insight into life in Poland in the 1960s, 70s and 80s and the difficulties faced by authors and academics who want to pursue their subject.… (meer)

In this exceptionally good novel Libera uses the infatuation of a precocious schoolboy with his French teacher to contrast the drab and corrupt culture of postwar Poland with the sparkle of French literary and artistic society.

"Madame's" background intertwines with different aspects of wartime and postwar Polish experience producing a remarkable account that is mostly unknown to Western readers (but could explain a lot of present day Poland), and as a bonus, and perhaps on a more superficial level, the story is an emotional roller coaster of a game with a great dénouement.… (meer)