Rozmaryn never knew his mother. When he finds an old photograph of her in the company of a stranger, he does what any person would do: he goes looking for answers. What he finds is Tefil.

Tefil lives in a garret flat in a quiet Polish town. He is balding, not especially fragrant, and fiercely committed to avoiding the repayment of small debts. He attaches himself to strangers and cadges pastries, coffee, and the occasional alcoholic dinner with the persistence of a tick. He has never married. In his working years he served as a village factotum; now he collects the clothes of the dead and philosophises.

His philosophy centers on mould. Mould, Tefil argues with full conviction, is the only truly unconquerable living thing—it survives being eaten and digested, it outlasts civilisations, and it is destined to consume everything, including humanity itself. He is not joking. Or perhaps he is. This uncertainty is precisely what makes him so difficult to leave.

Rozmaryn cannot pull himself away. Nor, it turns out, can the audience.

Tefil is a poetic novel in the tradition of Finnegans Wake—something closer to music or abstract painting than to conventional narrative. It does not resolve neatly. It does not try to. What it offers instead is a voice of extraordinary and deeply unsettling force, a meditation on decay and meaning and the stubborn persistence of the repulsive, and a character who is among the most singular in contemporary Polish fiction.

Winner of the Award of the Capital City of Warsaw (2022). Translated by Charles S. Kraszewski, whose previous translation of Wojasiński's Olanda was published by Glagoslav in 2019. Published with the support of the ©POLAND Translation Program.