If one were to plot the narrative topography of Paweł Huelle's mercedes-benz (in the original edition, published by Znak, 2001, the title and the author's name appear in lower case), one would come up with a coiling serpentine squiggle, or perhaps a childlike doodle -- if you imagine a three-year-old, her tongue sticking out, diligently applying a crayon to paper, with satisfaction retracing the same, but never quite the same, circle over and over. . . "i znów życie zatoczyło niesamowitą pętlę" . . . "and life again turned a full circle" . . . This is the refrain: the pętla, the loop, the full circle, or the noose, the line that plots the story from beginning to end and back, and ties it tight, leaving the reader breathless. Life likes series, as does narrative: a series of cars, crashed, sunk, confiscated, abandoned, and driven in circles; a series of photographs, remembered, lost, found, imagined . . . I am not sure which machine, the camera or the automobile is the true vehicle of the story.
