Herds of cows on a stretch of rail tracks beyond Oradea, sheep on a suburban street in Satu Mare, a white horse grazing in the middle of Suceava – the dirtiest, remotest, most god-forsaken part of our continent is inhabited by animals. In the endlessness of rusting warehouses, in the shadow of vast chimneys and between swaying trucks, they pluck at poisoned grass without a hint of worry or interest. As if they had been grazing there since time immemorial.

Andrzej Stasiuk’s literary reports from Albania, Moldavia, Rumania, Ukraine, Hungary and Slovakia are peppered with sequences that could have come from a Buñuel or Fellini film. When he returns he can hardly believe that he has really been there, that he did not simply dream it all – the bunkers, the satellite dishes and UN flags, the grass-covered steps, the villages in the Danube delta slowly sinking into the water, the little town where the children are born tired.

Babadag is the name of one of the towns he travels through between the Baltic coast and the Black Sea. One of those »weak regions« that disappear as soon as you turn your back on them. A panicky feeling that, along with their inhabitants, they could cease to exist if he did not describe them spurns him on. And Stasiuk’s new, maybe his most beautiful book about a world beyond the Dukla Pass is the product of a lover’s fear, the fear of loss.

How I Became a Writer