Here comes the end of the world

Michael Hofmann

  • Bohin Manor by Tadeusz Konwicki, translated by Richard Lourie
    Faber, 240 pp, £12.99, July 1992, ISBN 0 571 14437 3

For a year or more, I was haunted by the outline of a story: someone is told to immolate himself as a political protest. All day he runs around whatever city it is, as it were Leopold Bloom with a can of petrol, wondering whether to go through with it, waiting for the appointed time, saying his goodbyes. I didn’t know where this idea had come to me from; no one I asked knew anything about any book along these lines, and I was just beginning to think that I must have dreamed it and (God forbid!) that I should write it myself, when I came upon a copy in a second-hand shop: the book is laughingly entitled A Minor Apocalypse, the city is Warsaw, the liquid is not petrol but, unpleasantly, ‘thinner’, and the author of this terrific and almost unknown masterpiece is Tadeusz Konwicki.

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