Jack Haberek's bookshelf

I welcome you reader to share our memories we may have in common from yesterday's paper or TV news, or from forty years ago or four hundred... they all have one thing in common: a man - entangled into a web of events he did not create, not even influenced in many cases, and yet, with all he's got, trying to understand, to stop time, anyhow, and get a glimpse, prolonged, extended, careful... And you too can get that glimpse at any of these books (and all of them) at  amazon.com  or  barnsandnoble.com,  where they are available as classical books made of paper as well as E-books (Kindle).

 

Do not go gently (into that good night) - are the words by great poet Dylan Thomas, so well known today that they seem a cliche. Author here uses them to tell his reader to wake up, leave the general apathetic attitude and fight for our world that is faster and faster whirling before disappearing down the drain. Integrity and friendship, curiosity seeking new aspects of the world we live in, loyalty and respect for values they grew up in, as opposite to the people who are supposed to represent us... and - astonishingly - don't. A true portait of our times.

What would happen to someone who lived a bit before our time and back then was someone people really listened to? To answer that author moves the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre and his companion Simonne de Bouvoir to New York. Other characters corroborate what's happening, each and every one of them having apportioned a clear function in the composition of the work. Look, agree or disagree but, please, do not remain asleep - wake up and move. Write to your senator, for instance. Do something. It's your world they destroy. The only one you've got.

Old obsessions – politics, lies, everyday life and not everyday’s hobbies – shown to us in the context of artistic diversion bordering on schizophrenia. Through the nature of a sick artist author analyzes transformation mythology undergoes in the modern world. He uses Dr. Faustus myth, as created by Marlow, as his requisite, digested by the psyche of his hero — out of which his characters emerge; in modern, today’s America. Although making that quite medieval detour (even using Marlow’s language at some point) it is today’s USA author invites us to take a look at. Its relationship with the rest of the world as well. 

In ‘Silhouettes’ Haberek gives a portrait of deception — in a modern society (USA, for instance?) The ‘relationship’ between the government and the society at large. What do we know about politics? What do we know about our own lives affected by the above? Haberek’s fascination with the essence of a lie comes here to voice. Who are we? What is it that makes us tick? Why great outstanding people decide to become drug-selling hoodlums? Also, as in ‘Curricula,’ part of the action is the essay about what makes up the connotation of the word ‘literature’ (however different it might be to some of us).  

“Curricula” are author’s shot (in three short stories; from realism, through, parodied, ‘French school of looking,’ to, also, a parody of vorticism) at creating formal definitions of literature within what were the clearest influences on author’s own esthetics during his life. What is writing? Why does a man write a book? And – on the other hand – what is listening to a story? Why story telling is as important as it is? Author slowly ‘maneuvers’ the development of his narrative about writing towards the anthropological definitions – leave the world you know, go visit (go find your father, as Athene says to Telemachus), and then come back to tell us about it. “Curricula” has been the most misunderstood and misinterpreted of Haberek’s works so far — everybody has seen ‘Curricula” as three separate short stories and nothing further. Wrong. 

The story is that of betrayal, violation of friendship and love in today's world. Anyone can be suspect under the Patriot Act, which makes a system that would like to call itself 'democratic' no diffrent from the worst cases of totalitarian regimes known in the history of mankind. The main character, framed by his former friend, is deported cfrom the US to Rumania, where he ends up in a concentration camp, tortured and deprived of his civil rights. Those who finally found out that Jack was innocent, do nothing. Afraid of embarrassement, they keep silent. Hopeless and stripped of any sense, Jack is liberated by a global event, when a black hole moving at incredible speed through space approaches Earth and destroys half the planet. Jack escxapes his prison and walks through a crippeled world, discovering that, as one of this author's favorite once said: "a true life, life in the end discovered and explained, the only life, hence, simply lived thjrough, that's literature." Drowing on a massive body of learning that ranges from phylosophy to theology, science and art history, the author creates a story that is a conglomerate of human knowledge reflecting the problems Western Culturer faces today.

Jack Haberek was born 1952 in southern Poland (Silesia). Studied law and state administration, at the universities of Krakow (Jagiellon University) and Lublin, without graduating. Graduated from the university of Wroclaw (Breslau) with Master's degree in German Letters and Language. Publishing short stories and poetry in magazines, he continued studies at the doctoral level in Vienna - his subject was T. Adorno's influence on late Thomas Mann, his Doctor Faustus period. Few Years later moved to Paris, France, where he continued at the former Sorbonne history of world religions (among the others under Mircea Eliade). In the United States he published five books - ‘Curricula', ‘Silhouettes in the night', ‘Anger', ‘Crusaders' and ‘Do not go gently.' Throughout his entire life author traveled extensively, remaining for longer periods of time on most continents, getting to know local people, which in turn created sketches later worked into characters and situations in his books. Linguistics being his hobby from early on allowed him life contact and full understanding of people and events as they came along. His books are - losely - his own life, at least in their realistic layer. Main theme for him is and always was the question what is reality and what is literature? What is the difference between living and telling about it. People who had most influence on his approach to linguistics were Wittgenstein, Ingarden and Chomsky. How to write a literary text he learnt from Faulkner, Proust, Mann, Joyce and Tolstoy.

Through the lives of four artists author shows the world of culture run into the ground — cheap commercialism, replacing what once used to be "excurssion back to the source." Art understood as re-linking the present human predicament to its origin known to us only as intuitions, dreams, emd forebodings — well, art then, this type of spiritual endevour now belomging for good to the past, leaving the people like our four in here, stranded, with the deep feeling of being cheated by the destiny, only to be completely abandoned in the end, all of which means not only senseless outcom of individual human life, but also the destruction of the world in general as we still know it today. Could that be deliberate, organized effort? Or juswt greed and stupidity? Is there an escaping from that? Or are we just rats in a maze? Tin soldiers played with by a spoiled brat who keeps getting away with it?