The Eighth Day of the Week (European Classics)

By Marek Hłasko

Book Overview

In the period following Stalin's death in 1953, Marek Hlasko was the most acclaimed and popular contemporary writer in Poland. The Eighth Day of the Week, his first novel, caused a sensation in Poland in 1956 and then in the West, where Hlasko was hailed as "a Communist James Dean."

Two young people search for a place to consummate their relationship in a world jammed with strangers and emptied of all intimacy. Their yearning for the redemptive power of authentic love is thwarted by the moral and aesthetic ugliness around them. The Eighth Day of the Week memorably depicts the tension between the degradation to which the characters are forced to submit and the preservation of an inner purity which they refuse to relinquish.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0810111195
• ISBN13: 9780810111196
• Release Date: May 1994
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Length: 123 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.5" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

Warsaw, the gray gray city

Without knowing much about Polish writer Marek Hlasko, a reader of this novel could pretty much guess that he was born and raised under the gray curtain of Stalinism. Throughout this short novel that covers a 3-day period in rainy cold Warsaw, we glean nothing but despair and cynicism every step of the way. The story begins with the two main characters arguing on the banks of the Vistula on a "filthy day in May," a telling-enough detail: can anyone ever recall the month of May being described as "filthy?" (Perhaps it is in a figurative sense for anyone bred under Soviet communism: their month of May opened with the traditional May Day celebrations). Our heroine, Agnieszka, is arguing with her boyfriend Piotr because he wants to make love with her for the first time right then and there on the riverbank since "there is no place on earth for lovers to go." Both Agnies and Piotr live in overcrowded tenements in true commmunist fashion, rubbing elbows with dispirted people everywhere. Agnies' mother is a bitter, hateful invalid, her father a prematurely aging man already focused on his own death. Her younger brother, Grzegorz, is also prematurely old and a defeated, cynical idealist. Her old brother, Zawadzki, is one of the few persons in the story holding onto any hope and keeps plugging away daily at his job as a laborer and says "I want to believe in people." Agnies herself is jaded yet hopeful. She still believes in love & romance, is at odds with her home environment and keeps studying away for a degree in philosphy at university. What she craves most of all, she tells Piotr, is "peace and quiet." We seem to get to know Piotr the least. We know that he was in the armed forces and served time in prison for some type of political "crime." The thread of the story shows how each character looks forward to Sunday, the 7th day of the week, for one reason for another. Agnies' father is to go on a much-anticipated fishing trip; Grzegorz's girlfriend is to give her decision whether to accept his proposal of marriage and Zawadzki anticipates a visit to his fiance on that day as well. True to the cynicism thru-out the story, nothing comes through on Sunday for any of them. Sunday dawns a sleeting, cold day no good for fishing or trips to see girlfriends. Perhaps the title of the book stems from these characters' desperate need for yet one more day in the week to achieve what they so desire? Sunday turns out to be a horrendous day--you must read what happens to everyone! When Monday morning finally dawns, and everyone falls back into their routine, gray existences. Piotr and Angies part ways, true to his earlier conviction that "This is the 90th century. If Romeo and Juliet lived in Warsaw in 1956, they would never have met." Probably the sum of 8th Day can be read in Grzegorz's "Cynicism is the sole morality" but check out the last line in the book where Agnies' father is standing at the fro

No illusions, but still alive

Poland in the 60's.Characters drawned as with no illusions, a boy always drunken not to remember the present and the lack of love and understanding, his sister the only one who has sparkles of faith in the possibilities of humane changes, but at the end breaks down. On the background the system, the lack of morality that becames going over morality and only a try in surviving, no hope in joy. Everything seems to collapse, but at last Poland will remain the same, forever, for only humane beings will fall in dust, the spirit of the country'll remain the same, stifling and atrophying. The country survives because feeds on his inhabithans, on their blood and hopes.Hlasko recreates the disillusion himself lived, and died too early to realize that was right in his prophecy.