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	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
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THE BALLAD OF BARNABAS PIERKEL

Magdalena Zyzak

This wickedly funny, yet ominous tale is set in the quaint (although admittedly backward) imagined Slavic nation of Scalvusia in 1939, and is both a parody of the classic picaresque novel and a comic love story for the ages. Our hero, Barnabas Pierkiel, is a young swineherd with romantic delusions of grandeur. Desperate to attract the voluptuous Roosha, a gypsy who has also caught the eye of the town's most eligible bachelor, Barnabas and his trusty steed Wilhelm become embroiled in a series of scandals and misadventures, as every attempt at wooing ends in catastrophe. When the parish priest turns up dead and a suspicious stranger shows up to lead the investigation, Barnabas discovers a cruel streak in his beloved hometown. Our reluctant hero must take a stand to defend what he holds dear, or leave behind the only life he's ever known. Zyzak's wonderfully eccentric supporting cast includes a priest haunted by the devil, a teenage gypsy with mysterious powers, a dim-witted vagabond with a goat for a wife, a corrupt, obese mayor content to eat his way through life, and a senile old woman set on keeping Barnabas home with the pigs. Although our narrator maintains an ironic distance from these vibrant players, in the end Zyzak's humor and prose delight in the absurdity of the human plight even while she casts a searing light on the strange and sometimes twisted origins of human behavior. Magdalena Zyzak is a writer, producer and filmmaker. Born in 1983 in Poland, she studied in Switzerland and completed her BA at University of Southern California in Film Production and English Literature. She holds a MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. While still at USC, she co-wrote and produced the film Redland, an Independent Spirit Award Nominee. She is now producing her second feature film, Orion. She lives in Santa Monica, California. Make way for Magdalena Zyzak! She writes in a way that is uniquely her own and she approaches the English language with the joy and reverence of her countryman Joseph Conrad." Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story and Absurdistan

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Book Published 2014-01-01 by Henry Holt

Comments

We know Barnabas Pierkiel is our hero because the narrator tells us as much. And why wouldn't he be? A young swineherd much taken with his own reflection (which, because the family shard of mirror has gone missing, he must reflect upon in a pan of water) and as innocent of experience as he is full of romantic notions, Barnabas is a bright and sympathetic fellow by the standards of his village, Odolechka (the Pearl of the Outer Wheat Belt), in the vaguely Slavic state of Scalvusia. A certain nimbleness of mind had allowed him to master the alphabet at the budding age of twelve, while his schoolmates, who held his pigs against him, remained distressed or unimpressed by language in general. Read more...

A novel about an Eastern European village straight in the Nazi's path in the opening days of WWII gets an unlikely spin in Polish author Zyzak's first novel: It's a comedy part Marx Brothers, part Warner Bros. cartoon. As the region prepares for war, it's business as usual in the fictional nation of Scalvusia as the swineherd Barnabas Pierkiel dreams of a beautiful young gypsy girl betrothed to a prosperous town merchant. He lacks the sophistication to act on his wishes. It's a parable for a helpless community the reader knows that unimaginable destruction is coming in this ironic look at a way of life long destroyed.

Barnabas, the pig herder at the center of Magdalena Zyzak's picaresque first novel, lives in Odolechka, a cheerless little place in the fictional country of Scalvusia, in 1939. His story is retrospectively told in a fablelike way. Barnabas daydreams often and well. He pines for a Gypsy named Roosha. For her, I would invade Siberia, he proclaims, or at the very least the northern part of Bukovina. A sampling of the old-fashioned summaries that precede each chapter give a sense of the aggressively playful tone: In which Barnabas serenades his beloved and finds consolation in an albino peacock; In which Anechka attempts to sell her chastity to start an animal hospital; In which too much transpires to be summed up. As the escapades multiply, the farce can be slathered on a bit thick, but the book is inventive and funny, and the final pages offer an unexpectedly moving account of the Odolechkans' fateful battle against the invading Germans.

Magdalena Zyzak's delightful first novel, "The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel," has no noble characters, a good deal of mean-spirited behavior, and it all ends badly in other words, it's a comedy. For those who think that religious fanaticism, racial hatred and Nazis are not fit subjects for humor, Zyzak mounts a spirited defense. deal of mean-spirited behavior, and it all ends badly in other words, it's a comedy. For those who think that religious fanaticism, racial hatred and Nazis are not fit subjects for humor, Zyzak mounts a spirited defense. Read more...

RAO

loopy and farcical It's often said that during war nations descend into madness, but in Ms. Zyzak's entertaining novel madness is a preexisting condition.