“I wish I had problems that could be solved by hugging a tree,” he thinks during a visit to a therapist filled with difficult questions. Him. A man. A client. A patient. A husband – probably an ex. Not yet a father. The unnamed protagonist and narrator of the novel “Daybreak”. A man with an inflated ego and a sense of superiority, who has been everywhere, seen everything and has everything. And yet he is hit by a crisis, he is lost, uncertain, overstimulated. Tired of constantly rising to the occasion and what the world expects of him – both the big world around him and the smaller worlds he built (or ruined) around closer and more distant relationships.
Tomasz Michniewicz tells the story of his hero in several ways, skillfully misleading the reader, leading him through surprising clues and threads. In his novel, reality mixes with dreams, truth with fiction, and the facts of the narrator’s life with ideas about how it should look. We meet him at a moment when it becomes clear that the life he has known and led so far is ending. He is surrounded by hospital walls, people in scrubs, the sounds of medical equipment. Is he fighting to survive? Is he preparing for a spectacular change and painfully pushing the boundaries of his comfort zone? His accounts are interspersed with conversations with therapists and doctors. And his dreamlike and endless wanderings through the streets of the capital are accompanied by surprising encounters, sometimes with strangers, and other times with people he once knew, who appeared and disappeared from his life. Memories from the past mix with thoughts about the future. The hero of Michniewicz’s novel faces emotions that he himself cannot name. Will he be able to come to terms with incompleteness, insufficiency? Instead of accumulating, will he work through his traumas, fears and anxieties, and become a different, better person? Where will the paths he follows in life lead him?
The author of “Przedświt” Tomasz Michniewicz and his projects are regularly discussed by the most important editorial offices in Poland. He is a passionate traveller, a distinguished journalist, an expedition organizer, an author of five bestselling, award-winning book reports. This time, however, the subject of his exploration is not distant countries and global problems, but something that is closest to each of us, and to which we rarely have full access – the human interior, emotions, desires, hopes and frustrations. Things that are difficult to talk about and which are not easy to name and communicate to others, because they are not defined by dictionaries taken from family homes, relationships, non-romantic relationships with other people, from culture and customs. In his novel, Michniewicz confronts such terms as masculinity, fatherhood, role or relationship with emotions and mental states that are not always identified with them at first – with a sense of confusion and alienation, crisis, uncertainty and fear. In “Przedświt”, as in a mirror, not only contemporary forty-year-olds can see themselves, but all those who face emotional crises. It is a deeply moving story that asks questions about lost opportunities and the place of man in the modern world.