Andrzej Stasiuk.
By Richard West
In Fado, Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk writes not of Portugal’s national songs of lost love but Central and Eastern Europe’s lost villages seldom visited by travelers. Should you happen upon the mining village of Rudnany in Slovakia, a Hogarthian jumble of the poor, you’d find a thousand or so gypsies living at the bottom of an enormous earthen pit no longer excavated for minerals looking “as if they’d been thrown there at the whim of some malicious demiurge” writes Stasiuk.
