Truth is a stranger

"Ceci n'est pas un récit imaginaire. Tout ce que j'ai écrit s'est réellement passé, les personnages de cette histoire ont réellement existé." / "This story is not an invention. Everything I have written down did really happen; the protagonists of this story did really exist." This assertion, the author's plea to be believed (curiously absent from the English edition) is contained in the opening lines of a short Preamble (in the English edition, less poetically, Author's Note). Photographs interspersed throughout the story (for it is une histoire), starting with the glossy photographic band folded around the cover of the book like a vest, showing Monsieur Proust wearing the coat, are a tangible evidence of the reality of the narrative. Or are they?

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.