The Captive Reader

When Eva recommended A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True by Brigid Pasulka ‘for those who love a good family saga’, I was immediately intrigued.  If there’s one thing I love, it is a good family saga.  And one set (at least partially) during World War Two, in Poland no less?  Fantastic – I have a terrible weakness for novels set during this period and spend much of my life lamenting the fact that so few (of the English-language offerings at least) are set in Central or Eastern Europe.

I am happy to report that, yes, I did love it just as much as Eva said I would. 

The tale follows two young women – Anielica during and just after the war and her granddaughter Beata, known primarily by the rather cruel name of Baba Yaga, in the modern Poland of the early nineties, just emerging as a free country for the first time in over fifty years.  The two tales have very different tones.  Anielica’s story, the love story of Anielica and the Pigeon, is told from a distance, like any good fairy tale.  It is the proper kind of fairy tale, with violence and without perfect Disney endings, and all the more likeable for that.  At its heart is the famously beautiful Anielica, who proves herself time and again to be just as strong as she is beautiful. 

Baba Yaga’s story, on the other hand, is told in the first person and the reader forms a much more intimate bond with the narrator.  Having come from her village to Krakow in the wake of her grandmother’s death, Baba Yaga seems rudderless in a way Anielica never was.  Anielica lived in difficult times, but she had a close family and village to rely on through all of that.  She also had the Pigeon (who, despite his less-than-dashing moniker, makes an excellent, steadfast romantic hero).  Baba Yaga has her cousins Irena and Magda but, as the novel opens, she hardly knows them.  She could do anything but finds all that choice paralyzing.  Anielica’s story is a love story; Baba Yaga’s is a coming of age story and it’s wonderful to find both handled so capably in the same volume, giving us not one but two strong and complex female characters.

I would also argue that, more than anything, this is a love story between the many characters and the notion of Poland itself – from the resistance fighters during the war to the aging dissidents of the ‘60s and ‘70s to Baba Yaga’s own hopefully generation – the first generation to be free, but also the first generation that might not truly understand what that freedom means and what respect their country is due as they embrace the invasion of Western brands and lifestyles.  This was the theme, more than any other, that resonated with me as I read.       

If, at times, Pasulka exhibits a particular kind of Slavic fatalism (think things are bad now?  Just wait!), it’s one with which I am well acquainted and which I find comforting for that reason, though that doesn’t excuse some of her overly dramatic flourishes.  Pasulka writes beautifully and engagingly but these moments had me rolling my eyes, wishing she had showed more restraint.  Like many North Americans, I think she at times falls prey to the fetishizing of ‘the Old Country’.  It’s difficult not to, wanting so much to absorb the culture and the history of a place you belong to but which is still not a part of you and which you can never truly understand as a native would understand it. 

I’d love to go into more detail but am certain I would give away far too much.  It’s a charming book that I hope everyone will consider trying!