I found this book last July at A House of Our Own in the Eastern European fiction section. I'd never heard of it but it had a strong title and a nice cover and maybe 100 pages max; a low risk buy.
I ran a quick google search in the bookstore and learned that Marek Hlasko lived through the war in Warsaw and bounced around in Germany, Paris, Los Angeles and Israel until he died at 35 from a mix of alcohol and pill overdose.
He has this brutal quote on his wiki page that goes: " it is obvious to me that I am a product of war times, starvation and terror; it is the reason for the intellectual poverty of my short stories. Simply, I cannot think up a story that does not end in death, catastrophe, suicide or imprisonment. Some people accuse me of pretending to be a strong man. They are wrong"
He was a drunk and a vagrant for most of his short life and was thought of as a Polish James Dean. This book is the first of a para-autobiographical trilogy series about his life as a vagrant.
It's about two guys playing out their regular scheme as gigolo's in Israel to con single woman out of cash. It's also about the introspective space between his expectations of life versus reality; and an effort to explain the external reasons of his internal turmoils.
He is buried in Warsaw and the inscription on his grave reads:
" His life was short, and everybody turned their backs on him ".
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