[In the following review, Baranczak locates the tenor of Konwicki's views in New World Avenue in the tradition of the jester role, focusing on the paradoxical thematic and stylistic tone of the memoir.]

In 1959 the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski published a trailblazing essay, "The Priest and the Jester." The two personifications stood for the two opposed strategies of modern intellectuals—conservativecelebration of absolute values and critical questioning of them. Mr. Kolakowski himself chose the jester because, in his view, the jester's seemingly insolent and cynical "vigilance against any absolute" offered, paradoxically, the only chance to save humanity's endangered values, to provide for "goodness without universal toleration, courage without fanaticism, intelligence without discouragement, and hope without blindness."

Now that three decades have passed since Mr. Kolakowski's pronouncement, his coeval and compatriot, Tadeusz Konwicki, looms as Jester in Chief of Polish literature, an almost perfect embodiment of those four qualities. To be sure, the attitude of "vigilance against any absolute," along with its stylistic counterparts—a characteristically deflated tone, ironic detachment and propensity for the grotesque—have served as an identifying mark not just for him but for a much larger trend that dominated Polish letters during the last decades of Communist rule. Mr. Konwicki, however, has given this attitude its most memorable expression. He has done so mostly in his fiction: no history of literature of the now defunct People's Poland will ever omit The Polish Complex or A Minor Apocalypse, with their unforgettably absurd images of a mile-long queue functioning as society in miniature or of a dissident writer roaming Warsaw in search of matches needed for his self-immolation on the steps of the Palace of Culture. But Mr. Konwicki has also written several books of nonfiction, or, to be exact, books that at least pretend to belong in the category of "literature of fact."

"Literature of fact. I am the fact of my literature," Mr. Konwicki remarks curtly in New World Avenue and Vicinity, and this minimalist definition is true of each of his non-novelistic works. Within their sequence—which before New World Avenue included [Kalendarz i klepsydra (The Calendar and the Hourglass)], which has not been translated yet; [Rzeka podziemna, podziemne ptaki (Underground River, Underground Birds)], and Moonrise, Moonset, all four originally published over the 10-year span of 1976 to 1986—each book represents, more than anything else, the genre of a writer's diary, in the capacious and flexible sense given this term in the Polish modern tradition by the legendary Diary of Witold Gombrowicz.

The only two stable characteristics of this sort of diary are its formal diversity on one hand and its strictly subjective thematic focus and narrative perspective on the other. Just like Gombrowicz, who famously began his diary with the impudent "Monday: Me. Tuesday: Me. Wednesday: Me. Thursday: Me," Mr. Konwicki never lets us forget that his writing, all its apparent thematic variety notwithstanding, revolves constantly around the subject he knows best: himself. He can be provocatively, if not downright obnoxiously, self-centered, whimsical, obsessive, moody, inconsistent, even repetitive and overly emotional; but he never pretends to impose on us any truth other than the truth of his own individual perception.

But this does not mean that from his egotistic perspective only the inner landscape of his soul can be scanned. On the contrary, the central paradox of his diaristic nonfiction lies in the fact that instead of narrowing the field of observation, such an individualistic point of view broadens it remarkably.

While reading New World Avenue in Walter Arndt's excellent translation, we are in Mr. Konwicki's company without a moment's respite, but that would be wearisome only if he were a boring interlocutor.

He is anything but. True, he does his best to irritate us with his grouchy tone and general disgust with outside reality. This attitude, however, seems justified enough when we realize that Mr. Konwicki's book was written in Warsaw in the mid-1980's. Its obsessively self-centered nature seems to result at least in part from the author's agoraphobic reaction to the hostility seething in the surrounding world. His apartment is near the downtown street called in the optimistic 18th century—certainly with no irony intended—New World Avenue. But it is enough for Mr. Konwicki to step outside to see unmistakably what the Polish new world has come to at this last stage of the decline of the 20th-century utopia: he risks either being drenched by a water cannon spraying still another street demonstration, or mugged by one of the neighborhood junkies desperately in need of a high. It is no accident that the book's only positive hero is the author's cat; apart from isolated figures of relatives and friends from the past, the human inhabitants of the sick country and the sick world of the present do not arouse much sympathy in him.

Yet Mr. Konwicki's grumpiness, at times perilously near to whining, turns out to be just the outward sign of his usual "vigilance against any absolute." Any absolute, not just the dubious dogmas of declining Communism but also the most sacred stereotypes of its nationalistic or theocratic potential replacements. He may be a grim and despairing jester, but he never resigns the jester's privilege to say aloud what others pass over in safe silence, however unpleasant such truths may be.

He by no means turns away from the disgusting reality; rather, like a student of anatomy dissecting an odious frog, he cuts through its slimy surface to examine how its muscles and inner organs work. His idiosyncratic viewpoint allows him to address freely—precisely in a manner of a jester who does not care whether he offends anybody—the most urgent political and moral issues of the 80's. And to emphasize that he is oblivious to offense, he occasionally ridicules or lampoons the Government censor himself: "I know that Mr. Censor has been squirming on his stool for a good while now. Every moment he reaches for his blue pencil to put an exclamation mark here, underline a whole sentence there, mark a spot of pollution at the margin elsewhere. I know that Mr. Censor is now wrestling with competing thoughts: to take out the whole section or only delete what might offend or incense somebody or even provoke a telephone call."

The apparently hopeless predicament of Poland, whose martial-law rulers painted themselves into a corner of prolonged social crisis, is just the most immediate of those issues. Another is "the great paroxysm of democracy which runs through the world" and may not only bring relief to the enslaved nations but also unleash the dark forces of hatred lurking in their midst. The People's Poland, as well as the rest of the old East bloc, is happily gone; yet Mr. Konwicki's remarks on what may happen to Central European nations as a side effect of "the great paroxysm of democracy" sound almost prophetic today. This book's diagnoses and warnings, tied down so strongly to a specific time and place, have by no means lost their validity with the disappearance of the last water cannon from New World Avenue.