Wartime Notebooks

A Polish writers experience of wartime France, a cosmopolitan outsiders perspective on politics, culture, and life under duress When the aspiring young writer Andrzej Bobkowski, a self-styled cosmopolitan Pole, found himself caught in occupied France in 1940, he recorded his reflections on culture, politics, history, and everyday life. Published after the war, his notebooks offer an outsiders perspective on the hardships and ironies of the Occupation. In the face of war, Bobkowski celebrates the value of freedom and human life through the evocationin a daringly untragic modeof ordinary existence, the taste of simple food, the beauty of the French countryside. Resisting intellectual abstractions, his notes exude a young mans pleasure in physical movementmiles clocked on country roads and Parisian streets on his trusty bikeand they reveal the emergence of an original literary voice. Bobkowski was recognized in his homeland as a master of modern Polish prose only after Communism ended. He remains to be discovered in the English-speaking world.