Last Mazurka, The: A Tale of War, Passion and Loss

by Andrew Tarnowski (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2006

  $9.14

  The shot Count Hieronim Tarnowski fired on his wedding night in 1914, on the eve of the First World War, was like a tocsin that sounded the doom of his ancient Polish family. When in August 1939 his daughter Sophie saw blood pouring down the side of her train, she foresaw a terrible future and knew her idyllic world would be swept away. Thirty years later, when Count Hieronim's British grandson Andrew learned of the death of his mother - the beautiful, fragile and abused Chouquette - his sense of a lost identity deepened and he set out to rediscover the world from which he came. These moments punctuate an extraordinary tale of the downfall of a once-powerful family, which in turn mirrors the twentieth-century fate of a nation ravaged by invasions and crushed by tyranny. Before 1945, Poland, now a fledgling EU country, was an almost Tolstoyan world of wolf hunts and extravagant opulence, set alongside great poverty and a semifeudal peasantry, in a landscape of frozen fields and dark forests. Broken by war, it was reduced by communism to drab uniformity, and a way of life was lost forever. This world out of time is the setting for Andrew Tarnowski's memoir, The Last Mazurka , a tale of loss and exile, love and violence, wandering and longing, told with poignancy and unexpected humour, and all the more powerful for being true in every word.

• Used

  Paperback
  2007

  $3.29

  This is the paperback edition of Andrew Tarnowski's critically-acclaimed memoir, a beautifully-written saga which is the first book to both chart Poland's brutal 20th-century history and to reveal the secret world of an intriguing clan. The Last Mazurka is a good old-fashioned tale of love and passion, warring families, jealousy, violence, hidden secrets and betrayal, all set against the back drop of the Great War and the Second World War, with snowy landscapes, wolf hunts, grand lords and a healthy splash of vodka. Written with rich detail and dialogue, unexpected humour, and brutal honesty, it is full of extraordinary anecdote, vibrant characters and intriguing locations (Poland, London, Paris, Scotland, Cairo, Belgrade, Palestine). But it is also a tale of exile and loss, of devastation, self-destruction and downfall. Tarnowski has written with honesty and tenderness, never shying away from the painful and sometimes unedifying details. The result is a brilliant snapshot of a lost world. Never was Tolstoy's dictum 'each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way' so apt.