I Burn Paris has remained one of Poland's most uncomfortable masterstrokes of literature since its initial and controversial serialization in 1928 in the French magazine L'Humanité (for which Jasienski was deported). Having been one of the country's leading Futurist poets and reviled in the press, Jasienski became the rare practitioner of literary Catastrophism with
his move to prose and his immigration to France. I Burn Paris is a feverish hallucination of a novel whose only real protagonist is dead of the plague by the end of Part 1 as crisis-ridden Paris, full of the debased, tortured, and delusional, succumbs to its fate
With its montage strategies reminiscent of early avant-garde cinema and fist-to-the-gut metaphors, I Burn Paris has lost none of its remarkable vigor seventy years later. Jasienski is out to disorient, and he has a seemingly limitless ability to transform the Parisian landscape into the product of disease-addled minds. And there are many themes here that touch a particularly contemporary chord. The description of economic crisis is surely topical, but Jasienski's ruthless
dissection of various utopias also taps into an area that has recently been
receiving a great deal of attention.
This English translation of I Burn Paris fills a major gap in the availability of literature of the interwar Polish avant-garde.
his move to prose and his immigration to France. I Burn Paris is a feverish hallucination of a novel whose only real protagonist is dead of the plague by the end of Part 1 as crisis-ridden Paris, full of the debased, tortured, and delusional, succumbs to its fate
With its montage strategies reminiscent of early avant-garde cinema and fist-to-the-gut metaphors, I Burn Paris has lost none of its remarkable vigor seventy years later. Jasienski is out to disorient, and he has a seemingly limitless ability to transform the Parisian landscape into the product of disease-addled minds. And there are many themes here that touch a particularly contemporary chord. The description of economic crisis is surely topical, but Jasienski's ruthless
dissection of various utopias also taps into an area that has recently been
receiving a great deal of attention.
This English translation of I Burn Paris fills a major gap in the availability of literature of the interwar Polish avant-garde.
