On the Road to Babadag

A eulogy for the old Europe, the Europe both in and out of time, the Europe now lost in the folds of the map, On the Road to Babadag is valuable reading for UK readers. If we can't read our way around Europe, how will we ever find our place, our identity, within it?

Guardian

A Kerouac-style amble from the Baltic to the Adriatic

International Herald Tribune

A love letter to an area often neglected

Big Issue in the North

He is a self-consciously hard-bitten writer (whose career began when he was jailed for deserting from the Polish army) with a self-conscious hard-bitten style. His journeys are measured out with beers and cigarettes; his evenings with hard liquor... Stasiuk follows his 'perverse love for the periphery, for the provincial' as he traverses the outer edges of the former Austria-Hungary to the little Romanian town of Babadag... Lurking beneath his romanticism is an appreciation of the conflicting realities

Financial Times

Much of the power and originality of Stasiuk's book derives from this inversion of the ostensible purpose of travel, his methodological destruction of the simplistic teleology of the tourist, mirrored in a prose which is at once powerful, punkish, angry, and disorientating in its quest to probe into Europe's dirty laundry

Scotland on Sunday

Stasiuk captures this "other Europe" with clarity and eloquence as he charts his journeys through Albania, Moldova, Slovenia and elsewhere

Monocle

Stasiuk is one of Poland's best-known contemporary authors and On the Road to Babadag is a welcome addition to his growing English-language corpus... Unfailingly stimulating and ably translated by Michael Kandel

Toby Lichtig, Times Literary Supplement

Stasiuk's journeys are vivid poetry... What formally also underpins Stasiuk's travels, and rather beautifully embodies his resistance to the future, is how his prose communicates the working of memory, mirroring its inconsequentiality. His accounts are fragmented, shuffled, continued later or not. Time breaks down as it is past; in his mind events cover space and time in an even, translucent layer

Julian Evans, Prospect

The emptiness, the disconnectedness and the stasis deep inside Europe can be as emotionally transfixing and revelatory as the tumult of a city crowd on the Indian subcontinent. There are still places that insist the human condition is timeless... His eye is keen and his commentary as rich as they are throughout... The burgundy passports of Europe have spread across the region since this book first appeared in 2004. Time is on the march after all, and now English readers can enjoy the rewards of Stasiuk's entrancing attempt to stand in the way of progress. It's an exceptional writer who can rise to such an impossible challenge

Independent

This book has a peculiar charm and power

Literary Review

Thoughtful and poignant

Big Issue