Like Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist and critic, Konwicki has gained the attention and support of American writers like Updike and Roth for his mixture of satire, surrealism, humor, and political complexity. Despite some lapses into sentimentality and verbosity, [A Minor Apocalypse] shows Konwicki at his best and provides evidence of his potential for moving from the Italian Mondello Prize to greater achievements. Only his lofty popular status and the inner conflicts of the present regime seem to protect him from reprisals for his open flaunting of the communist bungling of Poland in the 1970's.

A Minor Apocalypse, composed in 1979 after the collapse of Gierek's bourgeois-socialist government, suggests why Solidarity could have risen (and as quickly fallen under the Soviet axe). The story involves a Kafkaesque hero who is told by his fellow dissident authors that he has been chosen to immolate himself that very day during a visit by the Soviet secretary to the Palace of Culture in Warsaw. In his journey around the city on his last day, the narrator encounters all the contradictory elements of Polish society—the bumbling secret police, the lapsed communists, the ambitious worker-leaders, the collaborators and dissidents, the film makers and writers, all except, oddly, the Church leaders (with only a naive but sinister young priest appearing near the end). As the narrator threads his way through these Fellini-like crowds (some from the present, others from the past), he carries on a Joycean monologue amidst the witty encounters. In this monologue, we learn of Konwicki's ambivalence about every potential for change in Poland today. The government, he learns on television, is about to offer to join the Soviet Union; the writers and film makers are either covering up a guilty past or secretly collaborating with the Party; the workers and middle-class are easily misled by power or pleasure. Even the hero himself succumbs to the sentimentality of a last minute fling of therapeutic sex with a Russian woman named Hope. He is also constantly confessing his own ambiguous motives and ends with an ersatz revelation that the only 'god' is the People.

Yet the novel fascinates the reader in the way that Orwell's 1984, with all its flaws, fascinates. It combines the surrealistic detail of a dream with the repartee and reflection of a novel of ideas. It embraces the narrator's favorite card tricks along with his opinions on physics and philosophy. It reads in places like Dante's Inferno, in others like a minor league Ullysses. The combination of irony, disillusionment, sentiment, and Hope suggests that the contradictions of the novel are those of the Polish soul in the twentieth century. (pp. 198-99)