A loop, a noose, and a plot

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. 

Plus, one mustn't forget the series of story-tellers, the letter-writer, the driver, the addressee, whose stories weave in and out through a series of references, more or less explicit, and story-tellers within the story, links in an endless chain of digressions. But, pour boucler la boucle, to loop the loop, or tie the noose, perhaps a word on that pętla that encircles the book. It's the returning to a familiar place, like a déjà-vu, saying, this happened before, the father drove a car just like the one the grandfather had driven; or again, one keeps starting over, the story is never told, the narrator, student-driver, picks up his lesson again ab ovo (with a new instructor), or re-enacts those taken by Bohumil Hrabal in another story, or yet simply goes for another spin in the driving instructor's tiny Fiat. Pętla may be quite simply tramwajowa, a streetcar terminal. Or the circle closes like the ouroboros, the tail is swallowed by the header and there you are, reading the book all over again. 

Perhaps, however, the pętla, drawn and redrawn in a childlike fashion, is a safety net, stretched taut and ready to catch someone falling, falling, say, from the fifth story? Perhaps the sheer possibility of repeating another's tale, of retracing another's steps, warrants against death? The loop shares with driving lessons and digressions a lack of end: verbal flâneurie that desires only to prolong itself, to avoid arriving at a destination, or at least, if arrive it must, let it be at a pętla, not a dead-end. The vehicles and machines and photographs, too, seem to both carry the story along and stall it or divert it from its tracks. The citroën flattened by a locomotive is captured in a snapshot that serves as a pretext for another story; a camera is used to interrupt a promenade in a car and drive the passenger to boredom (the plan derails in a most unexpected way, going astray, weaving its way into yet another story). And so on. If one were to plot the narrative topography, follow the tire tracks, of Paweł Huelle's mercedes-benz, one would end up with a coiling doodle, not unlike perhaps the famous squiggle featured in the greatest cock-and-bull story ever told.