Polish literature in English translation has been experiencing a golden age since the turn of the last century. Around 2000, there began a veritable explosion of new translations appearing on the English-language market. This includes works by older authors such as Gombrowicz and Pankowski, post-communist authors such as Tokarczuk and Stasiuk, and even new millennium authors like Masłowska and now Rafał Wojasińśki. Charles S. Kraszewski's translation of Wojasiński's Olanda presents the Anglophone world a work that is both complex and yet approachable at the same time: a joy to read and a challenge to analyze. Though a work of prose, its language is highly poetic, but a poetry that never falls into esotericism. With Olanda, Wojasiński performs a sleight of hand, making readers believe that he has presented us a collection of disparate tales in different genres; by the end, however, they are revealed to be a single, uniform story.In the presence of such an excellent critical introduction as translator Kraszewski provides to start the book, a review seems rather superfluous. Indeed, his essay, entitled “Scattered Bones Beneath the Juniper Tree,” makes the reviewer's job nearly impossible as his analysis, while perhaps not completely comprehensive, certainly illuminates the text in superbly insightful ways. The analytical channels Kraszewski follows in his examination mainly explore the metaphysical themes of the book. He argues for a universalist reading of Olanda, stating at one point, “Anybody might act a certain way in a given situation; in this way, Rafał Wojasiński superimposes our own faces on those of his ghostly characters” (p. 16). Kraszewski sees in Olanda a reflection of the wider world and, ultimately the entirety of human existence. In his analysis, for example, he brilliantly uses a song by the rock band Typefighter to support this notion of the universal aspect of Wojasiński's work. Though I am uncertain of his classification of the band as “grunge,” I am wholly convinced of his analysis.The book is nominally a collection, made up of the novella Olanda, several short stories—one an epistolary story in diary form—and finally the radio play “Old Man Kalina” from 2018. Except for “Old Man Kalina,” however, the anthological quality of the text is ultimately illusory. The six short stories that follow Olanda continually lead the reader back to the novella. One of the most important themes that connects the pieces is the long shadow of history that haunts the narrative. Specters of the various tragedies of twentieth-century Poland create a dark frame for the story(ies) that keeps the work grounded in the material while at the same time engaging in its philosophical meditations on the human condition. He describes furniture as “post-German” (p. 39)—meaning post-occupation—recalls a memory of listening to a speech by Gierek on the radio (p. 55), and at one point asks, “What was God thinking, when they were gassing children in the death camps?” (p. 108). As with much of Polish literature, it is difficult, if not impossible, to step out of history.Though the short stories are important to a complete analysis of the “collection,” the titular novella that opens the book is certainly the centerpiece. The narrative mainly consists of a monologue, the narrator speaking to the character Olanda, who has no real lines. The only seeming exception to this occurs when the narrator asks Olanda to read to him from his great-grandfather's notebook—a kind of found text within the story—which ends with the words “vale,” a nod to Don Quixote, the original experimental text. Of course, these words are not Olanda's own, but as readers we are supposed to assume she is speaking them.Olanda subverts the Aristotelian “beginning-middle-end” model of narrative, relying instead on a Deleuzian rhizomatic approach. Each chapter is given neither any numerical designation nor individual title. Instead, the title of every chapter is simply “The Next Chapter.” The reader then, if it weren't for pagination, would never truly know where within the narrative they are reading. Every “Next Chapter” could be the first, last, or indeed a middle chapter of the story. I challenge readers to read the piece “rhizomatically,” picking each “Next Chapter” randomly, including where they begin and end the story. The supposed ending of the novella, an ending only in the sense that it is the final chapter as far as page order is concerned, actually forces the reader to circle back to the “middle” of the text. The “final” lines of the text read: Count MarekI've bestowed that title upon myself, because I feel I have the right to. (p. 80)This leads the reader to the end of the narrator's great-grandfather's notebook which reads: Count R.I've bestowed the title of count upon myself. Considering the wealth I've accumulated, the manor, the lands I've won, I deserve it. (p. 47)The text then becomes a circle infinitely collapsing back on itself.The epistle that ends the original Polish text, “Hiacynt,” is particularly interesting. It is the diary of one Stanisław Hiacynt, as we learn at the end, with each section demarcated by a day of the week. The month and days of the month, however, are missing. For those readers who are cursed with memory two authors instantly come to mind when tackling this story; Nietzsche and Gombrowicz. The daily entries, sometimes as short as a sentence or two and rarely longer than a paragraph, recall Nietzsche's “philosophizing with a hammer” aphorisms; their tone is often equally dark. In Polish literature, the diary, of course, evokes the figure of Gombrowicz, the master of the genre. His three-volume diary remains the model for such texts. The last entry of Stanisław Hiacynt's diary seems to imply a kind of homage to Gombrowicz. In Volume 1 of Gombrowicz's diary, he famously opens with “Monday Me Tuesday Me,” and so on. Wojasiński turns this around a bit, as Hiacynt's final entry for Sunday reads, “My name is Stanisław Hiacynt. My name is Stanisław Hiacynt. [. . .] My name is Stanisław Hiacynt” (p.117). This simple sentence is repeated ten times in two paragraphs. The repetition represents a kind of neurotic need to shore up the narrator's identity and sense of self. However, if such repetition is indeed so necessary, it ends up revealing the actual instability of that selfhood.As the original Polish text has garnered Wojasińśki no small amount of praise in Poland—winning the Marek Nowakowski Literary Award in 2019—this translation is sure to do the same throughout the English-speaking world. It is both formally complex while remaining eminently readable. Any course on modern Polish literature would do well to include Olanda.