This monumental work, which took more than a decade to complete and won the Angelus Central European Literature Award, is one of the most compelling recent novels published in Poland.

Pulverkopf is a complex, intertextual exploration of identity – an attempt to assemble it from disparate strands unfolding across multiple times and places. Drawing on the archive of writings, sketches, notes, and seemingly random photographs embedded in the novel, its protagonist, Patryk Werhunt, seeks to trace the origins of his identity, piece it together like one of Georges Perec’s puzzles, and ultimately understand himself. Yet wherever the factual record is incomplete, leaving gaps in history, imagination steps in, leading to paradoxical discoveries. Through imagination, this ongoing negotiation with his own identity becomes an act of self-fashioning – a painful process shaped by illness and the experience of dying.

By weaving the text around the life of the composer Norbert von Hannenheim, the director continues her exploration of theatrical essays on the search for identity and the tensions between biography and artistic creation.

About the novel:

Patryk Werhunt, the novel’s teenage protagonist, grows up in Międzyrzecz (Meseritz), one of Poland’s oldest towns, seized by Germany and liberated in 1945. One day, he discovers the body of one of his neighbors floating in the Obra River. The circumstances surrounding the death remain unclear, and suspicion falls on Patryk just as he is coming of age. This traumatic event becomes the starting point for a sweeping narrative, intricately structured like a fugue, tracing the entangled fates of Poles, Jews, Germans, Soviets, and their descendants. At its heart is an obsessive search for the truth about the German composer Norbert von Hannenheim and what became of him.

“Intricately constructed, compelling, multilayered, and intertextual … There is no other way to put it: Pasewicz’s Pulverkopf is an outstanding novel. It may be one of the best, if not the finest, Polish novels of recent years.

If you have been waiting for the ‘great Polish novel’ – one that confronts our specifically Polish struggles with history and identity, and whose male and female characters are drawn so vividly that they stay with you long after you have finished reading – here it is,” wrote Wojciech Szot (Gazeta Wyborcza).