BEFORE THE CHINESE COME - JAN TOMKOWSKI

Discover the fascinating novel by Jan Tomkowski, which combines elements of prose, essay, and literary history. Immerse yourself in a hermetic world full of hidden symbolism and fictional games. An ideal read for ambitious readers looking for intellectual entertainment.

• Multi-threaded construction full of hidden symbolism
• Plot set in Poland in the 1980s
• Hero sinking into a world of fantasy and madness
• Novel that devours and leads to unknown regions
• Author combining various genres and fields
• Book that makes demands but opens new perspectives

Jan Tomkowski is a prose writer, essayist, literary historian, and researcher of ideas who combines various genres, themes, and fields in his work. In addition to monographs, syntheses, essays, sketches, and contributions, he also publishes novels and short stories. In 1985, he debuted as a prose writer with the novel Ragadon, and four years later, Tales of Scheherazade was published. The first fragments of the novel Before the Chinese Come come from about this period. It is a multi-threaded, hermetic construction full of hidden symbolism, false and true tracks, fictional games, and erudite allusions.

The action of this work begins quite ordinarily, in Poland in the 1980s, shortly after martial law. Poland is a country where young people at that time want to settle down as comfortably as possible, or preferably emigrate from it. The hero of the novel, not very resourceful and not very heroic, ends up in a city library, the strangest place in the world, where readers are not waited for and books are probably not borrowed at all. Greeted so unfriendly by two figures in power over books, he begins to weave a web of intrigues that are to lead to some political, intellectual, metaphysical change.

Absorbed in his fantastic project, he cuts himself off more and more from the outside world, plunging into a reality on the border between madness and magic. An inconspicuous old lady may be an empress reaching for power over the world, and her mysterious companion an organizer of a great conspiracy. A novel that devours the world, displaces the reality surrounding us, and leads to unknown regions that sometimes frighten us, but still fascinate us. A novel that does not describe the world, but argues with it, or even wages a war to the death? Such a novel would probably be an instrument of cognition, priceless and original. Before the Chinese Come is a book written over many years, addressed to an ambitious reader, making considerable demands, but also opening a completely different perspective than works that provide light entertainment.