The Road to Babadag is a love letter to a certain part of eastern Europe. Stasiuk, a native Pole, has traveled through this his beloved part of the world, where people live still pastoral lives and are rarely bothered by tourists. These are the villages of Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Moldova. He straddles the Carpathian mountains and visits the small towns, where he ingratiates himself with the local townsfolk over beer or plum liquor. He shuns the bigger cities, in fact he makes a point of avoiding any agglomeration with more than 10000 inhabitants. It is the small town culture he loves, the niceties of regular people, the local flavors. He admires the zigani, the farmers, the women, the children, all different folks that make up his ideal part of the world. He even writes about forays into Albania, Slovenia, etc. But his heart seems closest to the throughline of Hungary and Romania.
I enjoy reading about this part of the world, as my paternal grandparents were born at the foot of the Carpathian mountains. They were Jews – which is an element that is conspicuously missing from Stasiuk’s literary concoction. He writes page up and down about the mystique and allure of the Roma, but only mentions the word Jewish when he describes as old cemetery. Maybe he feels that Jews don’t belong in his idealized eastern Europe – even thought pre-holocaust they made up a sizable part of the population. Maybe he doesn’t think about them because nowadays there is not much trace of them having been there, besides the many synagogues transformed into auto repair shops.
I still loved reading about places I’ve heard my grandmother talk about, and I think Stasiuk is gifted in picking up interesting details. The style is quite meandering at times (especially in the last part, about the titular road to Babadag, which is a town on the Romanian Black Sea shore). Nothing really spectacular happens, but he conjures up the feeling of a place very well. It all seems to have been written in hindsight, pulled up from memory, half-remembered and half-imagined.
He writes about small nations, small peoples:
“Small countries should be exempt from history lessons. They should be floating around like islands a bit removed from the stream of history. At least that’s what I am thinking two days later on the motorway to Ljubljana.“
He makes a pilgrimage to the hometown of famed Romanian pessimist Emil Cioran, and quests to find the grave of 19th century Polish political leader Jakub Szela. He also makes space to do literary excursuses on the likes of Ion Caragiale and similar types.
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Kinship of all Species 