Andrzej Stasiuk is a restless and indefatigable traveller. His journeys -by car, train, bus, ferry - take him from his native Poland to small townsand villages with unfamiliar yet evocative names in Slovakia, Hungary,Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova and Ukraine. 'The heart of my Europe,'he writes 'beats in Sokolow, Podlaskie and in Husi, not in Vienna.' 'Wheredid
Moldova end and Transylvania begin,' he wonders, as he is being drivenat breakneck speed in a hundred-year-old Audi - loose wires hanging fromthe dashboard - by a driver in shorts and bare feet, a cross swinging onhis chest. In Comrat, a funeral procession moves slowly down the mainstreet, the open coffin on a pick-up truck, an old woman dressed in blackbrushing away the flies above the face of the deceased. On to Soroca, abaroque-Byzantine-Tatar-Turkish encampment, to meet gypsies. And all theway to Babadag, near the shore of the Black Sea, where Stasiuk sees hisfirst minaret, 'simple and severe, a pencil pointed at the sky'. Here is anunfamiliar Europe, grappling with the remnants of the Communist era and thearrival of capitalism and globalisation. This is an original, preciselyobserved and lushly written meditations on travel and memory.