At the book's core are two sisters, Ann Kar, a writer and survivor, and Carol, a suicidal artist. The result is a novel where Anna Karenina writes about Simone Weil, where Joseph Conrad meets Malcolm Lowry in Mexico, where Goethe presides over a literary institute made up of such members as Italo Svevo and Sextus Propertius, and where Djuna Barnes, dying from AIDS, visits Moses Maimonides in Japan. Ewa Kuryluk is fascinated by the repetition of the same situations and types, yet she's after her contemporaries who are starved for affection, lost in transit, ready to slip into somebody else's skin, and speaking English, their second language, with a heavy accent. Century 21 is a profoundly moving and original work.
Imagination has no country.
The only country an exile has is that of imagination and memory. Characters out of novels, dead writers, poets, philosophers, painters, and many others haunt the heroine. It reflects pre- and posthistorical characters and events and refracts them into thousands of other images. Time is anarchy and Kuryluk travels through it like a bullet train. . . . Whether as textilist or textualist, Ewa Kuryluk's art interlaces mystery and ambiguity, history and meaning.