The Graveyard

Set in Communist Poland in the 1950s, the harrowing story of one man's unraveling after a drunken slip of the tongue lands him in jail.
One of the most significant postwar Polish novels, this is the story of a modern Job whose eyes are opened to the emptiness that underlies the system he has bel [...]
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Set in Communist Poland in the 1950s, the harrowing story of one man's unraveling after a drunken slip of the tongue lands him in jail.
One of the most significant postwar Polish novels, this is the story of a modern Job whose eyes are opened to the emptiness that underlies the system he has believed in.
Franciszek Kowalski--a factory worker in his mid-forties--is on his way home one evening after a Party meeting when he runs into an old friend. The two men drink, catch up, drink some more, and by the time Kowalski heads home at last, it's dawn and Kowalski's drunk. When he unthinkingly yells some insults at a policeman, he seals his doom: his outburst is taken as criticism of the government, and this formerly upstanding citizen is arrested and then expelled from the Party.
Kowalski, a true believer, attempts to rehabilitate himself by gathering testimonies from the men he fought alongside, as an anti-Nazi partisan in the People's Army, but each meeting with his former comrades takes him farther and farther down into the underworld that he now realizes has been there all along.
Written midway through Marek Hlasko's meteoric career, "The Graveyard" set its author and the Polish Communist government implacably against each other, and it's easy to see why: Hlasko portrays a system that is maintained by hypocrisy, intimidation, treachery, and profound psychological manipulation. Once under suspicion, even accidentally, an individual was forever tainted--and it affected friends, family, everyone connected with them. Hlasko's stark and eloquent style suits this lacerating account from one of the original "Angry Young Men."