The Eighth Day of the Week

by Marek Hlasko

Published 24 March 1975
As bleak a vision of life in communist Poland in the 1950s as you're likely to encounter, *The Eighth Day of the Week* is a stunningly effective little novel. Jostled with Agniezka by the dantean hordes of drunks on the sidewalks of Warsaw, the reader descends into a world that is hellish, absurd, maddening, comic, and ultimately almost inescapably fatal to the human spirit. Discouraging, depressing, painful--all these things the novel is, but in the end it is also an exhilarating work of art.