My last, long overdue review from #20booksofsummer. It is an interview with the author of Snow White and Russian Red, Dorota Masłowska. I bought it out of curiosity, Masłowska is my age, she had her breakthrough as a writer quite early on and I was curious how she felt ten years later (the interview was part of her promotion of a book published in 2012).

It is a free flowing conversation, because Agnieszka Drotkiewicz aka the interviewer is Masłowska’s friend. They talk about a range of topics and some of her thoughts were really interesting, some felt familiar and some a tiny bit pretentious (in a familiar way, I think people in their early thirties sometimes just get pretentious, I know I do). They talk about living in a city and in the country side, about sea and America. There is a lot of observation regarding society and the place of a writer in it. I liked how Masłowska tries to find her way in a very politically polarized Polish landscape, she tries to avoid getting assigned to one camp only. She talks about fighting for time to write, how it is not something you can do in bits and pieces here and there between picking kids from school and driving them to swimming classes. I liked the part where they talked about food and different weird recipes they tried.

Where it gets more pretentious is when she talks about writer’s loneliness, about how our society is more and more focused on consuming and not feeling, about how awful Facebook and Twitter are. Those are all things I’ve both heard and said before and somehow I expected a bit deeper view from her, but on the other hand as I mentioned before even the pretentious parts felt familiar, maybe those are the complaints of my generation ;). Another thing I didn’t like was the interviewer, her questions were often flat and she had a tendency to agree with everything that Masłowska said, not challenging her one bit, as if she was feeling superior to other people by having a chance to interview Masłowska and agree with her on every count. Maybe it would be better if Masłowska asked the questions herself, I can only hope they would be more challenging.

All in all it was an interesting read for me, but nothing special from an overall perspective, it didn’t shake my world. I really loved the cover photo though.

This is book #16 of my 20 Books of Summer hosted by Cathy at 746books.
See my list as it grows here.

Photo by Violetta Kaszubowska @ vkphotospace