January 30, 2023, 11:05 am
Spring 1973: David Bowie gets off the train in Warsaw. He is still working on his breakthrough, which he should succeed a little later with the fictional character Ziggy Stardust. In the Polish capital, he enters a bookstore and buys records of Polish folk music, which later, during his time in Berlin, inspire him to write the song “Warszawa”.
With this incident, Dorota Maslowska’s novel “Bowie in Warsaw” begins, in which pop and socialism collide in the most amusing way, because Bowie sets off a whole avalanche of confusion and bizarre complications in the city: the owner of the bookstore, himself a writer who was unable to believes he recognizes his archenemy, the successful author Krempinski, in Bowie. The sensitive policeman Kretek thinks the young man with the quiff is the “lady strangler” who is scaring the whole town. Right in the middle is the bookseller’s assistant Regina, freshly expelled from the university, who rebels with sarcasm once morest her mother’s expectations, tries to get rid of her sausage-fingered admirer and almost throws herself into the Vistula. Everyone grapples with suppressed and open desires, envy and escape fantasies – until David Bowie shows up and everything is headed for a comic catastrophe.
