Showing posts with label Polish. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Polish. Show all posts

The Amber Heart - The Story of a Story - and a Valentine Freebie.

 


I've blogged before about my new book, The Last Lancer, the story of my grandfather's life and milieu.  It's currently with my publisher, awaiting edits, while I sit here watching developments in Ukraine with a sick sense of deja vu. 

Meanwhile, here's one I wrote earlier. The Amber Heart is set in the middle years of the 19th century, in what was then rural Eastern Poland  It's the story of Marianna and Danilo. She is a wealthy Polish landowner's daughter, born and brought up in the beautiful manor house of Lisko, while he is a poor Ukrainian estate worker. The lives of these two young people from vastly different backgrounds are destined to become hopelessly and tragically entwined from the moment of their first meeting. 

Back when I wrote the first draft of this novel, I had a good London based agent. I'd just had a novel published, and she was confident that she would be able to sell this one as well. I thought so too. Our confidence couldn't have been more misplaced. 

There were a lot more publishers in the 80s, although the Great Amalgamation had already begun, in which so many good small publishers were swallowed up by big corporations, gradually reducing the options for publication and the options for writers too. At the same time, and probably no coincidence, the so called 'mid-list' was disappearing - those well written, readable books that were never going to be mega sellers, but still sold steadily over many years, if they were kept in print. Which wasn't what the big corporations wanted at all. 

Desperate times, until Amazon, the Great Disrupter, saw not just a gap but a yawning chasm in the market and went for it like the proverbial rat up a drainpipe. Good for them. Now, smaller independent publishers are springing up, but they have a hard row to hoe, and so do writers. A  whole publishing infrastructure was destroyed in the rush to consolidate traditional publishing houses into ever bigger entities.

My agent couldn't sell the novel,  no matter how hard she tried, but it had - as she herself said - the most fulsomely complimentary set of rejections she had ever seen. One editor said she had 'stayed up all night reading it, couldn't put it down, wept buckets.' 

The stumbling block seemed to be its Polish setting. Nobody wanted to read a novel set in Poland, they said. 

Dear reader, I filed that original manuscript away in a box, where it sat mouldering for years. I still have that copy somewhere, out of pure sentimentality. It's on old flimsy paper,  typed - as far as I remember - on an early IBM Word Processor. 

I pressed on with my radio drama career and my theatre career, and even when I went back to novels and had some success - originally with a novel called The Curiosity Cabinet that is still in print with its gorgeous Saraband cover and many glowing reviews - I occasionally thought about chucking the Amber Heart in the bin. But I would start to read it, and realise that there was something about it ... something about Poland too. I wrote a stage play about the rise of Solidarity and three radio plays with Polish settings: Gnats, Amber and Noon Ghosts. 

Many years later, the novel was still nagging away at me. In between projects, I got down that faded manuscript and typed it up again. It's a long book and it was a big task, since I was editing as I went. In between times, I had acquired another agent. He read this new version and liked it, but suggested deleting the last third. Later, a different agent suggested deleting the first third. It was certainly much too long. Over several years, in between other projects, I reworked it completely in the light of all that I had learned since that first draft, and did, in fact, delete quite a lot of it, but not the beginning or the end! It's still quite a big book. 

Now, I can say with a certain amount of confidence that this is the definitive final draft and I don't intend to edit it ever again. It has to get out there and take its chance. It's on Amazon as an eBook and also as a paperback, designed by the talented Lumphanan Press, so you can take your pick. 

The criticisms I have had of it over the years have mostly been from mostly male Polish historians, who thought there was 'insufficient historical detail' and wanted it to be a factual account of those times. But that wasn't what I was writing, although I think such detail as there is, is accurate. 

Let's hope they like The Last Lancer better, although it's still a saga of conflict, love and loss, albeit a true one, so extraordinary that I could never have made it up. 

Anyway, if you fancy reading the Amber Heart, you can download the eBook free on 14th February (and for the two following days as well), Valentine's day, which seems a pretty good day to offer my readers the gift of a big bold tragic love story. 








Karol Kossak, My Romantic Hero

Great Uncle Karol Kossak
Recently, I did a guest interview for Rosemary Gemmell's excellent Reading and Writing blog. Rosemary asked me about researching my new novel, The Amber Heart and wondered how much my Polish background had informed the writing of this book. It brought to mind all over again, my charming great uncle Karol Kossak - that's him above, trying to squeeze his immensely long legs into a small horse drawn vehicle!
Karol was married to my Polish grandfather's elder sister, Wanda Czerkawska. There were five children in the family: Zbigniew and Boguslaw, Wanda, Ludmilla and my grandfather Wladyslaw. All of them, except Great Aunt Wanda, fell victim to the war in one way and another. The two elder brothers died in some border skirmish. Ludmilla, pretty, flighty and flirtatious, married a Polish army officer but was imprisoned in Auschwitz and died there. Wladyslaw was imprisoned by Stalin, released, and died of typhus on a long, enforced march East. Wanda met and married Karol Kossak before the war - he and my grandfather were good friends. Karol wasa younger member of a family of distinguished Polish artists, of which Juliusz and Wojciech Kossak are perhaps the best known. They painted battle scenes, were fabulous equestrian artists and all in all were a fascinating, if slightly Bohemian family.

My dad, who was demobbed in the UK after the war and stayed as a refugee, finally managed to get in touch with some of his family through the Red Cross. This was years later, after he had met and married my mother, and quite a long time after I was born. His mother died not long after this, but he stayed in touch with the Kossak side of the family.
I went to Warsaw by train when I was in my twenties to visit Karol and Wanda, who were living in a small spa town called Ciechocinek, and their daughter Teresa, who was living in Warsaw and working as an animator.We had to cross East Germany to get there, and the guards came aboard with dogs and guns! Karol was like a throwback to another age. I had never met anyone quite like him. Later, I saw a production of the Merry Widow in Vienna, and - as I told Rosemary - Count Danilo reminded me irresistibly of him. Karol was utterly charming. He would take me out walking or for rides in the horse drawn droshkis that were used as taxis in the town where they lived. The drivers would all doff their hats to him. We would go to cafes for coffee and cognac and he would draw little sketches on paper napkins for me - I have them still. He would kiss my hand and generally behave exactly as a romantic hero should. I think I was in love with him, even though he was in his eighties.
My Polish was about as bad as his English so we spoke in French which I could manage - and which he had spoken in pre war Poland.  He told me stories about the grandfather I had never known - how he was a 'ladies' man' - how he laughed a lot, was fond of practical jokes, was generous, brave and an excellent horseman, one of the last of the Polish Lancers.
When I came home, I wrote poems about Karol, and then a couple of radio plays reflecting my Polish background, but I always knew that eventually I would write a historical novel, or perhaps more than one, set in Poland. The Amber Heart is that novel and Karol found his way into it as Julian – the heroine’s delightful brother-in-law.


But sometimes, a poem still says it all - and here's the poem I wrote for Karol, not long after I came back from Poland.




POTATO FIRES
I remember
talking with my uncle Karol,
walking arm in arm
on Polish evenings when
mist spread over flat fields
and women were burning
the last of the potato leaves.

We wrinkled our nostrils.
It was a kind of myrrh for us
preserving the moment yet
bitterly telling time.

There's no cure for it.
Though I hurtle through youth
for love of him
he’s gone too far before. 

If you find yourself reading this blog on 23rd or 24th April, you can get a FREE download of the novel, on Amazon Kindle, in honour of World Book Night. If you look at the Authors Electric Blog, you'll find an interesting and eclectic mix of experienced and award winning writers, all of whom have decided to go for Indie Publishing in one form or another.
http://authorselectric.blogspot.co.uk

The Amber Heart - an epic tale of love and loss in 19th century Poland.

Painting by Juliusz Kossak

A beautiful, butter-yellow mansion.
A spirited heroine.
A troubled hero.

When Maryanna Diduska first meets Piotro Bandura, they are both children, but their situations could not be more different. Maryanna is the pampered daughter of Polish aristocrats, while Piotro is the child of a poverty-stricken Ukrainian widow.

Stefan took a pouch from his jacket and, with a laugh, scattered coins, as though scattering grain, watching them spread out and dive, hunting among grasses, squabbling volubly, fighting for what they could find like so many starlings. But one of them didn’t move. He was the tallest and the oldest, a boy of perhaps eleven, his hair black and matted, his face sallow under the grime, his eyes an unexpectedly bright cornflower blue. He stood still, hands hanging by his sides, fists clenched, and he stared up at Maryanna, unsmiling, unmoving. She shifted uneasily. For perhaps the first time in her life, she saw a gaze of pure resentment directed straight at herself. She turned her head into her father’s jacket.
‘Daddy, tell the boy not to look at me,’ she whispered.




But this is also the tale of the beautiful house of Lisko, Maryanna’s beloved childhood home, and the way in which the lives of its inhabitants will be disrupted by the turmoil of the times.

Out on Kindle, before the end of March 2012, The Amber Heart is a vivid, dramatic and unashamedly romantic story of love and loyalty, of personal tragedy and triumph, set against an intriguing backdrop: the turbulent Eastern Borderlands of 19th century Poland.

The first draft of this novel was written many years ago, while my Polish father was still alive. He was the best dad anyone could ever wish for and the book is dedicated to him. The novel was praised by my agent at the time, the late Pat Kavanagh, and then by countless editors. 'I couldn't put it down. I stayed up all night reading it. I wept buckets!' wrote one of them, before adding that she would have to turn it down. You see, The Amber Heart always fell at the sales and marketing hurdle. 'Nobody knows about Poland!' they would say.

Over the years, I've gone back to it from time to time and - rereading it - have realised that it has stood the test of time. Now, a few other people have read it and said the same thing. I've worked on it, of course, honed it, polished it, responded to some useful editorial suggestions and brought the benefit of my own greater maturity to the story. The advent of eBook publishing has finally allowed me publish this novel which, of all the things I have ever written, has been closest to my heart. So many of the elderly Polish people who generously helped me with research for this novel are dead and gone. But they have left me with a great mass of interesting material in the shape of documents, photographs, postcards, diaries and first hand accounts, not least the notebooks my late father filled with stories and sketches of the Poland he remembered.

My dad.

If you read the Amber Heart, and are intrigued by the background to the book, you'll find more to entertain you here. Over the coming months, I'll be mining all that fascinating background information to write the occasional post about pre-war Polish history, customs and traditions, costume, arts and crafts, and food. Whatever takes my fancy, really. I'll even post a few recipes.
I hope you find it entertaining, and that you might  like to join in with your own comments.