Stasiuk's Tales of Galicia—something so lovely

I first read this novel, Tales of Galicia by Andrzej Stasiuk, translated by Margarita Nafpaktitis, almost a year ago, and I still find it profoundly beautiful in its craft.

It begins with vignettes about various characters' daily lives until a major event takes place and the stories link up and become a novel. While being mostly about some drunk farmers, the stories occasionally launch into passages like this:

[…]everyone became as transparent as angels or as their own most secret dreams that they never remembered when they woke up on all of the dawns that had been allotted to them. For a moment the radiance shattered their bones, burned them to ashes and pulverized their bodies, so that they forgot about their own names and shapes, about their pain and their burdens, and about the time that had collected in their veins and felt like hot sand or lead and never, but never, allowed them to know rest.

The line afterwards is the real punch, but I won't spoil.

—I admire these! Is there a term for these opportune flights of amazing language and imagery and metaphor? If so, I don't know it. I'll just call them 'flights.'

These 'flights,' then, in particular make use of the 'would' tense—

At that time, or today or tomorrow, Józek would swim like a fish in the ocean. His wake always assumed the shape of double looped infinity. He tilted back the bottle and, gulping, swallowed down his own tail along with the beer.

 —which fits well. The stories are little portraits of larger lives, by which we get a sense of the person's whole life from little glimpses. More than that, as reading the translator's notes and reviews would point out, there's a running motif of the confusion of time, of blurring past and present, especially when a ghost narrates a fair portion of the novel.

The other particular stylistic choice I'd like to point out is the conversational tone with which one of the darkest events is portrayed. And then after it all, the last paragraph begins simply with, "Yeah." I generally appreciate formal styles, and yet I find myself admiring the decision. It's very effectively done, I think!

These little bits of style, and the rest of the airy, sublime style really, guides the story—the whole story that is, made up of little stories. I almost want to call the style 'light-filled,' like the imagery of golden sunlight pouring into a church on at least two occasions, but it's also dark-filled at times. It's a story that really depends on style, having little besides style, just a mundane 1990s village setting rendered significant and emotional through words and a ghost and some metaphor. It's the style that brings about heaviness where there is heaviness, and lightness where there is lightness.

That is in itself why I appreciate Galicia so deeply. Along with a narrative it almost just posits a very admirable way of seeing the ordinary. 

I want to see like that.