A novel that was not there: on Andrzej Sapkowski’s Sezon burz

Andrzej Sapkowski’s new novel, which after almost fifteen years goes back to the world as well as the character of Geralt the witcher, possibly the most important hero in the sword and sorcery genre in Poland, has left readers with a sense of awkward unfulfillment. Reviews appreciate the smooth narrative and fast-paced action of the novel, yet they also complain about the lack of the unspecified but essential effect characteristic of the previous volumes. This paper constitutes an attempt to interpret the novel in the context of the abovementioned incompleteness: by means of the chronotopic analysis and juxtaposition of motif series, I describe the complex process of dismissing every possible consequence of the novel’s plot, which, in the long run, is rendered irrelevant. That is how the text, on the one hand, engages the reader in a game of excitement and unfulfillment, while, on the other, seems to correspond with the fantasy genre deconstruction project hitherto realized by Sapkowski, and thus enters a dialog with both the expectations of starved fans and the academic criticism directed at the author’s work.

A novel that was not there: on Andrzej Sapkowski’s Sezon burz

Andrzej Sapkowski’s new novel, which after almost fifteen years goes back to the world as well as the character of Geralt the witcher, possibly the most important hero in the sword and sorcery genre in Poland, has left readers with a sense of awkward unfulfillment. Reviews appreciate the smooth narrative and fast-paced action of the novel, yet they also complain about the lack of the unspecified but essential effect characteristic of the previous volumes. This paper constitutes an attempt to interpret the novel in the context of the abovementioned incompleteness: by means of the chronotopic analysis and juxtaposition of motif series, I describe the complex process of dismissing every possible consequence of the novel’s plot, which, in the long run, is rendered irrelevant. That is how the text, on the one hand, engages the reader in a game of excitement and unfulfillment, while, on the other, seems to correspond with the fantasy genre deconstruction project hitherto realized by Sapkowski, and thus enters a dialog with both the expectations of starved fans and the academic criticism directed at the author’s work.