Tefil

Rafał Wojasiński’s latest novel, Tefil, is the story of an old man whose main occupation is cadging meals from unsuspecting passers-by, while regaling them with philosophical narratives of life in a small Polish backwater, wearing the clothes of dead people donated to him by the families of the deceased. His interlocutors – or, rather, listeners, of whom a young man named Rozmaryn acts as a pars pro toto – are not quite sure why they are mesmerised by the loquacious clochard, and neither is the reader, at first, until they find that they cannot quite put the book down. The reason for this is simple: like Dante in the fourteenth century, so Tefil in the twenty-first, is a representative human, lost like us in the selva oscura of life, and as the former leads us on a journey through the other world, so the latter drags us along the streets of the obscure town of Litental, which he ‘cannot abandon,’ and which soon rises to the level of a metaphor of existence itself.