Her Pen, His Phalanx
Dorota Maslowska was just a baby when she published her debut novel, but a baby with a foul mouth and searing tongue, ebullient and unashamed. At the center of Snow White, Russian Red is her protagonist Nails, whose mother imports cheap cigarettes and whose brother hides away speed in the snack closet. Both potentially taming influences are absent from the novel during the weekend of its duration. The protagonist is on his own.
At the start, Nails has just tossed away his girlfriend, and we encounter him in a bar. He’s trying to assuage his grief with speed. From this point onward, Maslowska will take us on a protracted march through his turbulent mind on a drug-induced clown parade. Nails will suck down speed, violate and intoxicate, even urinate on a pair of canaries for no reason. In the plot point that seals his fate, he steals a pair of walkie-talkies from McDonalds.
The actions of Maslowska’s protagonist are inferred as much as described, and it’s hard to know what Nails is really doing. By the end of the novel, we’ll learn there is no Nails, just Maslowska playing puppet master with a protagonist by that name. After two days, he’ll have disintegrated and only she will remain.
In the novel’s most well articulated and penetrating sequence, Nails will stick his cock in a sleeping virgin on the eve of the Assumption — August 15, 2002 — a day that’s celebrated because Mary is deemed too holy to suffer the grave. A day of longstanding tradition, Maslowska’s fellow countrymen will parade red and white flags in a swell of national piety for the Madonna, and young people her age will walk halfway across Poland to visit the Black Madonna shrine at Czestochowa.
The holy Mother is a religious symbol and a patriotic one, believed to have sustained the nation through various occupations and divisions by the Prussians, Germans and Russians. Honoring her is an act infused with patriotic zeal. Having the protagonist decimate a virgin on such an occasion is a way of rejecting the values of conservative patriotism.
The novel’s recurrent symbol is a plastic “Sztorm” pen, the plastic outer-casing through which Nails inhales speed. It’s no wonder she asks, in a question posed to reader, “Was the pen phalanx?” There is no Nails, just Maslowska rubbing her thighs on his teenage rope, a little shy and a bit angry, trying to give form to the underworld of men. The author is trying to resolve the shear animal in man with her fascination for his sex. Her pen is his phalanx in hand.
Maslowska is good at unwinding tension under the cover of novel to tell us what she really thinks of a certain track-suited, head-shaved, thoroughly Polish male. (Not much.) To the novel’s detriment, Maslowska can be a writer writing about the process of becoming a writer, which will be lost on readers who are not writers.
Maslowska injects herself into the novel twice. At first just in passing reference and later to confront her protagonist in the flesh. This time she’s a stenographer in a police station typing up Nail’s statement. There she’s subjected to the crass humiliation of her hero, though curiously, Nails has desecrated every female in the book but has no aggression toward her.
Here I find the act of self-insertion a reminder that she’s a young artist experimenting with words. There’s also an artist’s imposition going on here — and Maslowska is saying it takes the author to end the protracted explosions of her enfant terible. She’ll have to enter the text in person to do it. Of course, it’s convenient to write yourself in as the sympathetic centerpiece of an unsympathetic hero. (He is after all your hero. You created him). But is the mercy deserved?
*Process* gives it 6 out of 10 for what critics have been quick to point out: she’s a writer unconscious of being observed. Even though Maslowska’s skin-headed hero is both xenophobic and unnerving, as a running metaphor for her own fragmented experiences of youth, he works.
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A book review of Snow White & Russian Red, 2005, by Dorota Maslowska, translated by Benjamin Paloff, [Wojna polska-ruska pod flaga bialo-czerwony]
