Full Description
Sitting by her window with a glass of cranberries in sugar syrup bought from a woman in the market who assured her they came from Karelia, she muses "Perhaps they have some other kind of effect when you eat them. Spiritual maybe? So I eat and wait for the Karelian cranberries to work their magic on me." Skarynkina is impelled to spend the last of her money on a trip to Krakow to meet Czeslaw Milosz but never finds his address, so he remains to her an idol like Elvis Presley dressed in gold lame. Each story has a charm and imaginative flight of its own.
Contents
Note on language
Introduction by Maryja Martysievič
Smarhoń the Magical
Hugs
Death and the Panama Hat
The Real Brodsky
My God!
Angels on the Frontier
The Silver Screen, an Old Church and a Cinema called `Cosmos'
On First Name Terms with Borges, Tolstoy and Nabokov
Post Mortem
Maryja and Japan
Winter Camp
Three Generations of Domestic Porcelain
Figure Skates and Dead Classmates
A Window on Another Life
Talking about The Brothers Karamazov
When Writers appear in Dreams
Rabbit Meat, Gypsies and the Ocean
Four Sisters and the Cornflower Blue Dress
A Large Dose of Czesław Miłosz with a Dash of Elvis Presley
The Restaurant that gave us a Foretaste of America
Two Film Stars
Pork Knuckle and Stuffed Camel
Onegin and the Surgeon
Time to have Your Hair Done
Do you remember the Hypnotist?
A Farewell to Pugachova
The Face is not Right
Greetings that waft from my Childhood Days
Notes on the Text
