Andrzej Stasiuk’s book Squatting (Kucając) depicts a mythologized world stretched out on the axis mundi. This world is an image of a macrocosm with all its play of the elements and a perennial return of various phenomena, mythical cycles of vegetation and the changing of seasons. At the same time it provides insight into a microcosm (life in all its minute manifestations), and an emphatic observa- tion of insects, birds, frogs, deer, sheep or a dog. Stasiuk’s fiction is characterised by a subjective and personal relation to the animal world he describes. Such an attitude is a legacy of an animistic paradigm, which assumes an initial solidarity of all beings, a community uniting the human and animal elements.
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