Moving Parts [Hardcover]

Magdalena Tulli (Author), Bill Johnston (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2005

In Moving Parts a feckless, comical narrator struggles against all odds to tell a story for which he is responsible, but which he neither controls nor understands. His characters multiply, repeat, and go astray; his employer is paying no attention, asleep in a drunken stupor. The increasingly desperate narrator clambers over rooftops and through underground passages, watching helplessly as his characters reappear in different times and settings and start rival stories against his will.

This thought-provoking, wryly humorous work from the acclaimed author of Dreams and Stones tells of the sadness of the world and of the inadequate means that language and storytelling offer us for describing and understanding it. Yet it does so in Tulli’s characteristically clear, concrete, gorgeous prose, and, as with Dreams and Stones, the book is a delight to read. This extraordinary work, utterly unique both in its form and its message, shows a European master at the height of her powers and constitutes a major contribution to a new century of European literature. Moving Parts was shortlisted for the 2004 Nike Prize, Poland’s most prestigious literary award. W.S. Merwin claims, “The originality of Tulli’s writing is not lessened by representing a family tree that includes Michaud, Kafka, Calvino, and Saramago.”

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Magdalena Tulli was born in 1955. "In Red" (Wczerwieni, 1998), her second book, also received great critical acclaim in Poland and elsewhere. Tulli lives in Warsaw, where she works as a psychologist and translator. Johnston is Director of the Polish Studies Center at Indiana University. His translations include Gustaw Herling's The Noonday Cemetery and Other Stories (New Directions, 2003), Jerzy Pilch's His Current Woman (Grove, 2002), and Stefan Zeromski's The Faithful River (Northwestern, 1999). In 2005, he won an ASTEEL translation prize for Tulli's Dreams and Stones.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 133 pages
• Publisher: Archipelago Books; 1st edition (October 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0976395002
• ISBN-13: 978-0976395003
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,321,468 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #90 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Eastern European

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful new voice from Poland, February 21, 2006

By 

Joseph P. Schneider "a churl" (Madison, WI United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Moving Parts (Hardcover)

Parts of Speech is a magnificent work of meta-fiction. Imaginative, funny, wandering; highly recommended to lovers of the likes of Jose Saramago and Italo Calvino.

4.0 out of 5 stars a fictional novel, in which nothing really exists, except in our minds, our desires and on the paper, April 14, 2008

By 

Bethany L. Canfield "Dreadlock Girl" (Corvallis, OR,USA.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Moving Parts (Hardcover)

Moving Parts is an incredible, truly insightful novel in which the narrator looses control of his story. What? Yes! He becomes a character and cannot get out of the view of the reader. This is not a book to breeze though, it is jam packed full of brilliant quotes and stunning writing. The concept of this novel, and the storyline are completely unlike anything that I have read before. The depth in language use and parts of speech was over my head many times, but a lover of grammar would fall in love with the way words such as "predicate" and "parts of speech" are woven into regular everyday language, which the author does with ease.

While reading the word choice and use of certain phrases I could not help but to feel that I was missing out, that it was incredibly vast and I was only drinking from the surface. If you are a person who loves to think, who loves incredible well-thought deep quotes and an intense knowledge of language captivates you, this is your book. Read it and you will love it. It will speak to you and drive you to a deeper understanding about the other books that you love to read. It will guide you through the feelings characters suffer in being written about, and those that narrators must endure in order to tell their story (even if they don't want to), it will help you know more about the concept of a novel, in which all is created...but by whom? Who is in charge of these books that we read, who leads the reader? How would it be if things were not the way they should be in a novel, if the characters did not follow what the narrator asked of them, if past and future were slowly blurred and confusion was the key theme of the story? Read Moving Parts by Magdalena Tulli and you will surely be submersed in this fictional chaos of writing and will be taken to a deeper understanding of our current idea: a fictional novel, in which nothing really exists, except in our minds, our desires and on the paper.

Quotes from Moving Parts:

"All he can do, and that only to a certain degree, is to govern grammatical forms, an essential element, especially as open space, of their own accord taking on the forms of the future tense, without any obligations" (p.26).

"The parts, always the same ones, wait like traps into which new characters will continue to fall, irrespective of their own wishes, promises, and misgivings" (p. 62).

"They even tried to joke about this process, but their jokes were not entirely successful; they were not funny enough for them to convince themselves that they were safely beyond the reach of grammar. And so in the end, exhausted by the anticipation of leaving and by visions of an uncertain future, they changed the subject, returning to a certain betrayal, because betrayal was at least something they were capable of understanding" (p. 95).

" Hardly anything is possible any longer. And no truth will appear until the secure forms of the past tense impose order" (p. 132).

0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dancing with more than one Muse, February 25, 2006

By 

Brooks G. Tish (Kirkland, WA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Moving Parts (Hardcover)

It is unlike anything I have ever read before. I loved it not only for the delicious sentences to devour and for the winding plot -- although the form is intriguing -- but for the sheer joy of its literary construction. For a writer it is like dancing with a series of Muses that keep cutting in on each other.