Content area
Full text
Polish Feliks Netz. Dysharmonia caelestis Katowice-Warszawa. Slask. 2004. 186 pages. ISBN 83-7164-436-1
THE TITLE of Feliks Netz's recent work, Dysharnionia caelestis (The disharmony of heaven) offers itself for interpretation in a Central European context. Netz, an accomplished translator of Hungarian literature (he rendered Sándor Márai's Embers into Polish), is certainly familiar with Péter Esterházy's Harmonia coelestis, a great postmodern fictional history of a Hungarian aristocratic family. Netz, in turn, sets out to write a somewhat disjointed yet emotionally coherent account of his own family and locality.
In other words, this is a very Silesian book. It reveals a Poland much more complex and differentiated than one had imagined and a situation in which most people had to focus on survival, often at the cost of demeaning compromises. During World War II,...