If the task of a good novel is to describe a particular time and a particular place in such a way that they seem real to people who never knew that time and that place, then here is a very good novel indeed. I didn't grow up in 1960s communist Poland, but from the first few paragraphs of Madame, Antoni Libera's narrator beautifully evokes the disappointment and claustrophobia of that time, when to be a Polish schoolboy was to feel certain that nothing interesting was ever going to happen again:

For many years I used to think I had been born too late. Fascinating times, extraordinary events, exceptional people - all these, I felt, were things of the past, gone for good.

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