A Chip Shop in Poznan by Ben Aitken has been sitting on my bookshelf for probably more years than I care to think about it. It’s always my “I’ll read that one next” before I find myself picking up something else. Turns out that was fate staying my hand because when I realised my Eras Train Tour was going to take me to Poznan, I knew it was the perfect time to finally read it. I’d take it with me, I’d have read a chunk of it on the way to Poznan and by the time I’d got there, I’d know everything there was to know.
My favourite thing about this book was that it had this row of colourful houses on the front cover. Could I take a picture of the book in front of the houses? I got on Google Maps and discovered very quickly and easily that it’s exactly where I thought it would be, in the picturesque market square in the middle of the Old Town. So when I arrived on Monday afternoon, I left my luggage in my apartment and went straight to the square with the book in my bag and triumphantly took a picture of the book with the houses on its cover. Glorious.
Unfortunately, that literally is my favourite thing about this book. Ben Aitken is a travel writer who decided to move to Poland as the 2016 EU referendum approached, partly out of a desire for change and partly to find out why Polish people move to the UK, by being a person from the UK moving to Poland. Poznan specifically was picked because there were cheap flights, because he’d never heard of it and because it was unlikely to have a large English-speaking population. The trouble is, ultimately, he’s moved to Poland to fulfil no particular aim and he doesn’t really seem to do much. He drifts, he runs into people who invite him to things but we never get to know any of the people who drift in and out of his life, he goes to various places but we never really get a feel for any of the places.
It’s not helped that it’s written as a diary. Actually, it’s an interesting format, the diary of someone who encounters things he doesn’t really understand, which are then clarified in a series of footnotes. I quite like that he’s not weaving his research into the story in a way that comes across quite omniscient but instead showing all the things he doesn’t know and has to find out about later. And yet it also has a real feeling of “didn’t bother doing the reading, just showed up and assumed I already knew everything I’d need to”. No one actually arrives in a new place crammed full of all the knowledge – otherwise you wouldn’t bother travelling. You need the context for a lot of it to make sense. It’s absolutely fine to be bewildered and to look up the answer and yet something about seeing it in print is kind of frustrating.
Aitken’s intention is to get a job in Poland so he can earn and live off a Polish wage in order to get a feel for what it’s really like to live in Poland – hence the chip shop. It’s not his chip shop and he isn’t even there for half the book. At first he works as an English teacher and then he just leaves the chip shop. It certainly isn’t pivotal to the book. It makes a good title and an interesting premise, until you discover that it isn’t really the premise at all. And he doesn’t even live off his Polish wages. He has royalties coming in from his previous books which is what he actually lives on and I suspect from the level of detail in his diary that this book was always planned and therefore there might be an advance. I know royalties and advances aren’t huge amounts of money which makes me wonder if he’s also supplementing them with freelance writing. Because the book suggests he doesn’t spend a huge amount of time at the chip shop and he does spend a lot of time apparently either not doing a lot, drinking or smoking in the middle of the night, and visiting every corner of Poland he can get at. Although now I’ve drawn them all on a map, I realise I’m 98% sure he misses out Warsaw and the entire north-east.
This is the trouble. It’s literally just his diary of not doing a lot for a year in Poland. There’s no narrative, no attempt to reshape his experiences into something narratively satisfying. That’s why I sat for four years on my Iceland book, because it was also just my experiences of travelling a country that isn’t natively mine (trying to compare my holidays in Iceland with his year living in Poland) but it needed to make narrative sense. This doesn’t. This is just “I did this”, “I went there”, “I drank too much here”, “I met a person and chatted with them for four sentences”. It’s unsatisfying. The impression you end up getting is of someone who moved to Poland to just… not do much for a year.
I appreciate his efforts at learning Polish and I suspect he did better at it than he mostly tries to let on. This is a flaw with too many travellers, that they make no effort to learn the language. Yes, you can’t become fluent in every language you ever encounter, especially if you’re the sort of person who’s in a different country every week. But you could pick a language to make a long-term specialised study of, or at least to get to the stage where you can catch a few words. I guess it’s an Anglophone thing – we don’t learn languages, even if we’re doing the sort of job where it would be beneficial. I know a few people who’ve worked their way through Duolingo, to announce “I still don’t think I could actually have a conversation with a real human” but it’s very few. So for Aitken to have spent a year learning Polish, mentioning off-hand the many and varied grammatical difficulties for a learner – I like that. I wish it had been more prominent.
I think this book had great potential. I think the idea had great potential but I think the finished published book also had great potential, which I don’t feel like it quite lived up to. I wish more of it had been about Poland and less of it about drinking until 4am and stumbling around new places without learning anything about it. There was a lot I liked, but mostly what I liked was the potential rather than the reality. I’m very glad I took it with me, I think I’d have kicked myself if I missed the opportunity to read this in Poznan but I wish there’d been a bit more that I could have used to “follow along” in real life. I’m glad I’ve read it. But it left me a bit underwhelmed.