The Palimpsests

By Aleksandra Lun

Czeslaw Przęśnicki, an Eastern-European immigrant writer, has survived the long toilet paper lines of communist Poland, the loss of his lover Ernest Hemingway following a passionate affair, and the beatings of the Antarctic literary community for his forays into novel-writing in their native tongue. In The Palimpsests, Aleksandra Lun's stunning debut novel, we find him languishing in a Belgium asylum (a country, we are persistently reminded, that has had no government for the past year), undergoing Bartlebian therapy to strip away his knowledge of any language that is not Polish, his native tongue.
Despite, or perhaps because of, its absurdity (comic and tragic), The Palimpsests is characterized by an unquestionable timeliness, relevant to today's discussions on immigration, senses of cultural belonging and ownership, and personal relationships to language, complicated and simple, adopted and native. Peppered with darkly comic cameos from famous writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, and of course, Przęśnicki's former lover Ernest Hemingway, it is the perfect book for lovers of language and the act of writing.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1567926525
• ISBN13: 9781567926521
• Release Date: October 2019
• Publisher: Verba Mundi
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.4" x 8.4"