THE MIGHTY ANGEL concerns the alcoholic misadventures of a writer named Jerzy. Eighteen times he's woken up in rehab. Eighteen times he's been released—a sober and, more or less, healthy man—after treatment at the hands of the stern therapist Moses Alias I Alcohol. And eighteen times he's stopped off at the liquor store on the way home, to pick up the supplies that are necessary to help him face his return to a ruined apartment.
THE MIGHTY ANGEL concerns the alcoholic misadventures of a writer named Jerzy. Eighteen times he's woken up in rehab. Eighteen times he's been released—a sober and, more or less, healthy man—after treatment at the hands of the stern therapist Moses Alias I Alcohol. And eighteen times he's stopped off at the liquor store on the way home, to pick up the supplies that are necessary to help him face his return to a ruined apartment.
While he's in rehab, Jerzy collects the stories of his fellow alcoholics—Don Juan the Rib, The Most Wanted Terrorist in the World, the Sugar King, the Queen of Kent, the Hero of Socialist Labor—in an effort to tell the universal, and particular, story of the alcoholic, and to discover the motivations and drives that underlie the alcoholic's behavior.
A simultaneously tragic, comic, and touching novel, THE MIGHTY ANGEL displays Pilch’s caustic humor, ferocious intelligence, and unparalleled mastery of storytelling.
It offers Pilch—a prize-winning Polish novelist and newspaper columnist—a way to get at the absurdity of politics, the unbridgeable gap between public and private life. . . . The result is a vivid tension that is only amplified by the exuberance of the book.
Steven G. Kellman
Pilch’s antic sensibility confirms that he is the compatriot of Witold Gombrowicz, the Polish maestro of absurdist pranks. But readers with a taste for the fermented Irish blarney of Flann O’Brien, Samuel Beckett, and John Kennedy Toole might also savor Pilch.
Valentina Zanca
The acclaimed satirist and newspaper columnist Jerzy Pilch once again weaves fact and fiction in a memorable absurdist tale of flawed political resistance.
Jerzy Pilch is one of Poland's most important contemporary writers and journalists. In addition to his long-running satirical newspaper column, Pilch has published several novels, and has been nominated for Poland's prestigious NIKE Literary Award four times; he finally won the Award in 2001 for THE MIGHTY ANGEL. His novels have been translated into many languages, and A THOUSAND PEACEFUL CITIES is also available in English from Open Letter.
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Overview
While he's in...