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Article: Madame.(Review)
- Article from:
- Chicago Review
- Article date:
- June 22, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 University of Chicago. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Antoni Libera. Madame. Translated by Agnieszka Kotakowska. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2000.
The unnamed narrator of Antoni Libera's much-lauded novel Madame has a problem. A precocious high-school student in Soviet-controlled Warsaw in the 1960s, he is in love with his glamorous, thirtysomething French teacher. So what is the problem, you ask? What could be more common than a student developing a crush on a teacher? For Libera's narrator that is precisely the problem: it is so commonplace, so cliche, so kitschy (to use the word beloved by Central European writers) that it drives him to distraction. "I've got to do something," he moans when he realizes ...
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Article: French lessons post-Stalin
The Spectator;
February 10, 2001 ;
683 words
...MADAME by Antoni Libera, translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska Canongate, L10.99, pp ... 1960s communist Poland, but from the first few paragraphs of Madame, Antoni Libera's narrator beautifully evokes the disappointment and claustrophobia ...
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