The Loves of Faustyna - Softcover

Though the publisher's blurb for FitzPatrick's second novel calls it "a riotous sexual odyssey," readers will quickly ascertain that what's most at stake is not sex but politics, and though the blurb refers to the narrator's "shapely bottom," readers will be pleased to encounter a yet more provocative mind. Set in Poland during the Communist years of the 1960s, The Loves of Faustyna echoes the passion and humor characteristic of Milan Kundera's stories of life under dictatorship, when pursuits of love and friendship become entangled necessarily in dissent, interrogation, subterfuge and incarceration. "To all outward appearances we were a modern society," says Faustyna of a nation besieged by secret police, "But in truth... we were once again a neolithic tribe reduced to fornication, food-gathering and ritual incantations." Pregnant with her daughter, Julia, Faustyna quips that the girl has two fathers, one a soldier in the army and the other a worker for Solidarity. At last arrested for treason, Faustyna's lyrically comic look at prison erupts in confusion about precisely with which side she is supposed to have been collaborating. The result is a novel that trains a wistful, intelligent gaze at someone trying to be a woman when her very personhood is at risk. Passages in which hatred is likened to "inherited despair" and in which the narrator muses on "the overwhelming maleness of violence and power... its eagerness to sheath itself in metal and leather and brass buckles," reveal an author of remarkable wisdom and clarity. National advertising.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Pay no attention to the blurb on the jacket of this book. Though it promises "a riotous sexual odyssey...in communist Poland in its dying decade," this book is hardly a lusty read. Faustyna is a young woman who conspires to lose her virginity under rather unusual circumstances. Once she has orchestrated her deflowering, the story follows her various jobs, political activities, and troubles with the police, all of which lead to her subsequent romantic involvements and the birth of her illegitimate daughter. Fitzpatrick displays a vivid sense of imagination, but her novel is a bit confusing. At one point Faustyna remarks, "Who in their right mind wants to read about the existential horror of Eastern European intellectuals?" Ironically, that is just what Fitzpatrick's novel demonstrates. Only for large general collections.
Kimberly G. Allen, MCI Corporate Information Resources Ctr., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.