Paul Ericson

Zal Paul Ericson

When asked if the camera can lie, the photographer Walker Evans replied: ?Always.? For the narrator of Zal (pronounced "zhahl"), the greater problem was self-deception. The story unfolds in the forty-eight hours preceding the 1981 crackdown by the Communist regime in Poland, as the narrator ? a free-lance photojournalist documenting the era of Solidarnosc ? searches for Marta, the enigmatic student he?d met months earlier in Krakow. Interwoven are other recollections ? reaching back to his youth and forward to 1991, a decade after martial law in Poland abruptly altered the course of history. By turns haunting and hopeful, gritty and comic, Zal is a novel of words and images, memory and regret.