A Tale of Cruelty and Money in Poland

Sometimes the last person who ought to be allowed near a story is the writer. “Miss Nobody” is a modestly promising tale about a working-class schoolgirl tormented by two schoolmates from Poland’s post-Communist privileged classes.

Tomek Tryzna has abducted his story, run it through a variety of literary genres, perfumed it with gouts of magic-realist hallucination, and crimped it into a cackling morality of evil assailing innocence. Only occasionally does a spark of life survive its mannerisms. There is the occasional touching obduracy of Marysia, the victim, and a faint hint that the two adolescent tormentors, in their elaborate malevolence, are themselves creatures of their decadent, moneyed background.

At the start, Marysia’s father, a miner and part-time carpenter, moves his family from their village into a housing project in the city. Fifteen-year-old Marysia, imaginative and high-strung, starts her new school in a state of nervous anticipation.

Her classmates make fun of the country mouse; mockingly they praise her unsuitable dress as an undoubted Paris model. Chief mocker is Eva, elegant, glamorous and a style-setter. Unexpectedly, the other class star, the brilliantly eccentric Kasja, takes Marysia as her protege.

The first part of “Miss Nobody” recounts the mind-blowing whirl through which Kasja puts Marysia. She overwhelms her with lavish treats, shocks her working-class respectability by stealing a book and spends the afternoons composing on an expensive battery of synthesizers in her comfortable apartment. Her mother is a prosperous doctor who is rarely there; her father, a Frenchman who lives in Africa.

Marysia is mesmerized by Kasja’s posturing as a genius subject to madness. Kasja insists that she is the prey of a demon who orders her about with the threat of destroying her musical gift. Before long, overstimulated into hysterical weeping, Marysia has discovered a demon of her own. Kasja forces her pious adept to spit in a holy water font; then, announcing that “Be Kind to Animals Week” is over, brutally discards her.

In the book’s second part, Marysia’s former tormentor, Eva, “discovers” her. She takes her for 100-mile-an-hour motorcycle rides--bribing a traffic cop with money and kisses--and invites her home for sleepovers. She regales her with clothes, splendid meals and the sophisticated company of her super-rich family and their friends. That she, like Kasja, has been laying a cruel and corrupt trap comes as no great surprise to the reader: Tryzna springs it with tinny melodrama.

The author can write deftly. The scenes where Marysia returns to her shabby home display the pathos and dignity of a working-class family trying to cope with their familiar duckling, as she develops the rich and sickly liver of a Strasbourg goose.

The poisonous intellectual and material decadence represented by Kasja and Eva, respectively, might have furnished a suggestive fictional look at the social and moral undoing in formerly Communist Europe. The struggle within Marysia between yielding to seduction and resisting it might have spun a line of authentic tension.

Tryzna dissipates it. Rather than develop story and characters on their own ground, he chooses a showy solution from the nowhere-land of international literary fashion. Marysia is needed to register the decadent maneuverings of the society she enters. Instead of registering them, she goes into a succession of magical-realist fugues, sometimes as dreams and sometimes as waking hallucinations.

Bad enough that they are inflated, over-colored and without implication. (An awkward translation does not help.) But even if done better they would be out of place. It is as if Gulliver, visiting Lilliput, were to grow short; or Dorothy, entering the Emerald City’s throne room, were to speak Wizard instead of Kansas. It takes a plain, not a distorting, mirror to show distortion.