Marcin Wicha (1972) is a Polish designer, illustrator, columnist, and writer. Having written a few books for children, he turned to adult non-fiction with a personal slant, of which the present book is the second instance, after his debut, How I Stopped Loving Design, was published to popular and critical acclaim in 2015, also by Karakter. Things I Didn't Throw Out is told in short, anecdotal chapters, collected in three sections: „My Mother's Kitchen”, „Dictionary”, and „Laughing at Appropriate Moments”, and forms a loose diptych with How I Stopped Loving Design, which focused on Wicha's father in the aftermath of his death (both books work as stand-alones, too).The book is a first-person account of processing grief through the objects his mother, Joanna, surrounded herself with while living and dying. The first part is mainly devoted to Joanna's books and how they formed a part of her life in its various stages. The second is a series of stories about objects (such as her typing machine and her ballpoint pens), mementoes, phrases and words that were important in Joanna's life and which allow us to construct an image of her as a person, a mother and a Jewish woman living in Communist Poland. The third, shortest one is a stark, unflinching report of her final illness and death.Wicha meditates on the obsolescence of objects after their owner dies. The book is a collection of memories of a difficult person who lived in a difficult time – Wicha realistically describes the material meanness of the Communist regime, the shortages, rudeness and the hoarding instincts shaped by post-war reality. Joanna's Jewishness, her devotion to work, her argumentative temperament, the clarity and no-nonsense quality of her opinions - all that accumulates into a fully fleshed-out character whose decline and death is then described in terse, unsentimental, yet very touching scenes. The result is cathartic.In the first section, Wicha deconstructs the post-war history of Poland in a series of chapters which transform his mother's bookshelves into an almost geological accumulation of many decades of sediment. During his childhood, in times of economic crisis, he has to stage a long war of attrition with a bookshop sales assistant in order to buy the new Tove Jansson book. In a long chapter analysing the caustic wit of Jane Austen's Emma, Wicha describes his mother's passionate relationship with that book, which always consoled her in times of low mood, but couldn't do the trick after her husband's death. He looks for the background stories in the little doodles on the margin, the tiny hole on one page, finds the history of socio-economic transformation of 20th century Europe in his mother's cookbooks, and mentions his mother's jokey ambition to move to Canada, reflected by her English textbook.The second section has a broader context of politics and history. Wicha describes politics as an excuse not to talk about personal problems; his mother's was a life spent with politics in the foreground, because there was no other way. Wicha explores the common, generational trauma of March 1968, when the remaining Polish Jews, frequently hiding their identity, were subject to a campaign of intimidation and social cleansing. In chapters seemingly about trivia, Wicha writes about the legacy of a community of people which was annihilated – about how they continue to be present in tasteless jokes, awkwardly-worded memorial signs, allusions during family gatherings. This section shows incredible sensitivity to the layers of global, local and personal histories that add up and intertwine.In the third section the short chapters are untitled, which adds to the fragmentary nature of the text and the impression that Wicha is barely holding it together. In between conversations with his mother's live-in Ukrainian nurse, doctors, paramedics and his mostly non-responsive mother, Wicha attempts to carry on and make sense of what is happening, give it meaning. The last six short chapters deal directly with his mother's death; they encompass the formalities and banal details that he has to attend to, the unbearable pain and helplessness, the need to keep going. Thus concludes this archeology of love, exasperation and grief, not without moments of dark humour.The book would be perfect for readers interested in: exploring the parent-child relationship, especially (but not exclusively) at the end of the parent's life, and issues of processing grief and remembering, or reading an off-piste exploration of the 20th century history of the Jewish community in Europe. Things I Didn't Throw Out is a wry and unsentimental account of the emotional and physical labour of a carer and an attempt to understand one's parent as a person with their own history, personality and temperament independent of parenthood. It is also a nuanced portrait of a woman who refused to compromise and continued to demand respect, who was sensitive to language and the complexities of history, society and politics. Some comparisons might include Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk, Cathy Rentzenbrink's Last Act of Love and Brian Dillon's In the Dark Room.
