Lack of Faith in the Existence of the World? Magdalena Tulli’s Story about a Mother and a Daughter with PRL in the Background

Abstract

This work aims at analysing and interpreting the PRL reality in the two last prose volumes by Magdalena Tulli – Włoskie szpilki [Italian High Heels] (2011) and Szum [Noise] (2014). The first part discusses Włoskie szpilki, viewed as a story about becoming mature in the PRL era, as well as about the inability to fully understand what belongs to the past (the mother and the daughter are victims of the past, however, the younger one tirelessly attempts to come to terms with what happened to her). PRL sets here the scene where the drama of the imposed illusion is played, scenes from everyday life accompanied by violence (physical and mental). The second part concerns Szum, interpreted as a deep analysis of staying with the “fumes of compulsion”. PRL sets the novel’s background, affected by the syndrome of lost causality, weakened axiology, superficial behaviours and judgments. The authors’ attention is also focused on literary images and definitions of different incarnations of the category ‘normal’. The title noise is also a result of the memory of words, the freedom of which depends solely on the receiver’s attention.