Book Smart

Polish tradition holds that wishes made on a falling star come true if you can get the wish out before the meteor burns out.

“One night, my mother, who was still living in Warsaw, Poland, e-mailed me, telling me to go out at 10 o’clock at night to see a rain of meteors falling from the constellation of Leo. I was living in the Berkshire Mountains and knew I probably would see nothing there at 10 o’clock. In spite of that, I went out and climbed a mountain. I saw nothing. Very sad, I came back home and imagined that I was still living with my parents in Warsaw and was climbing with them to the roof of the house to look at the sky. When I imagined that, I wanted to know what happened next, so I started to fantasize about an alternative life, the life I would have lived if I had stayed in my country,” Beilin says.

The result is this new novel, Beilin’s first. After her initial ruminations during the night of shooting stars, she concluded that if she had stayed in Poland she probably would have been a journalist working at the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. Like her own experience in the Berkshires, her protagonist comes home from work one day to a meteor shower.

“He anxiously tries to figure out what to wish for. When he gets to the roof of his house he immediately sees an incredible spectacle, a sort of fireworks, as if the whole sky were opening, changing colors from white to yellow to red. ‘I wish I wish I wish,’ he says, and actually says something, although I never make it clear what exactly it is. It is my idea that he actually says something like ‘I wish it would all go to hell,’ and from that moment on, this is what begins happening in his life,” she says. “He had been successful in his work, had a great wife and, even if he is not aware of this, really likes being who and where he is. Step by step he loses it all for not knowing what he really wants.”

The journalist abandons his wife for another woman, a story in herself. After her mother abandons the family, her father curls up in bed and leaves the real world farther and farther behind.

“He does nothing but read novels and watch movies on video, which his children bring him. He talks to the protagonists on the videos from his bed, believing he participates in their adventures,” Beilin says. “What I realized in writing their stories is how the first images, first metaphors and first narratives we consume form important structures for our psyche.”

Writing the novel provided some valuable insights into her classes on 20th century Spanish literature.

“Writing the book awoke my interest in how literature and film are able to manipulate human beings. Art manipulates us implicitly, creating our desires through metaphor and image,” she says.

Meanwhile, she says she already has begun turning ideas around in her head for the next novel says. “My greatest novel, to be written some time in the future, will be about my mother, who inspired me all my life. I dedicated this novel to her, and to all those who do not know what they are waiting for.”