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Miss Nobody Book

Coming-of-age novels don't get much darker than Tomek Tryzna's debut, Miss Nobody. Beginning in blood and ending in betrayal, this tale of a young Polish girl's journey from innocence to all-too-painful experience limns a searing portrait of adolescence. Tryzna's protagonist, 15-year-old Marysia Kawczak, moves from her small village to the big city of Walbrzych where she finds herself living in a housing project. This country cousin soon gets taken under the wings of two very different peers: the musically inclined Kasia and the precociously sexual Eva. If Kasia represents the spirit in this novel, Eva undoubtedly embodies the flesh and all its temptations; not surprisingly, the two girls dislike each other and Marysia is increasingly torn between them. Told from Marysia's point of view, the novel is a mélange of dreams, fantasies, and perhaps even hallucinations, as when Tryzna's heroine steps into the woods on the day she menstruates for the first time and finds a young man lying on the path skewered by a spear. "Gripping the spear, he wriggles his body, like he's trying to climb up.... He sees me. He begs pitifully, 'Little girl, please help me. Pull this out of me. I can't do it alone. Please, pull it..." Though the symbolism gets laid on a bit thick from time to time, Miss Nobody is a promising first effort from a novelist we're sure to encounter again. --Margaret PriorRead More

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  • Product Description

    Marysia Kawczak is a fifteen-year-old girl growing up in the grey flatlands of Poland, where she feels she is predestined to become--like her mother--a house-slave, "a 210-pound lump of fat with varicose veins." At the age of fifteen, Marysia moves with her parents to the nearest big city. It is here that she meets two streetwise girls, Kasia and Eva, who--each in her own way--begin to teach her the secrets of life. Marysia's drab life suddenly gains color, as she discovers not only the ostensible ways of the world, but also the subtler experiences of love, sex, desire, passion, and--finally, in the novel's breathtaking conclusion--betrayal.

    Combining elements of straightforward contemporary fiction, the metaphysical, fairytales, and the epic, richly layered styles of Dostoevsky, Flaubert, and Mann (to whom many international critics have compared him), Tomek Tryzna has made an astonishing literary debut.

  • 0385489390
  • 9780385489393
  • Tomek Tryzna, Joanna Trzeciak
  • 1 January 1999
  • Doubleday
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 304
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