Conversations in the Book Trade: March 2020

On Jerzy Andrezjewsky’s one sentence novel: « a poignant novel originally written and published in Polish, consisting of 40,000 words that form two sentences (the second of which contains only five words: “And they marched all night”) that tell the story of the 1212 Children’s Crusade, involving an old monk who listens to the confessions of five seemingly holy, but in fact just horny French adolescents trudging towards Jerusalem in a dubious attempt to recapture the tomb of Jesus, all of whom—it turns out—have joined the Crusade for other than spiritual reasons, as the confessions reveal their hopeless, obsessive infatuation with the beautiful Jacques—the children’s leader and object of desire of almost everyone in the procession, males and females alike—giving an ironic insight into the world of idealism and faith, bringing out the protagonists’ destinies tied together by love, lust, folly, yearning, confusion, desperation and (false) hope, foreshadowing their tragic end, which, although left floating in the air as a dire premonition, appears to be inevitable, giving The Gates of Paradise a rather sad tone, much unlike the second one-sentence novel from this list, »