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I read about this book on boeklog.info and I bought it. Polish literature is almost completely unknown to me, apart from the works of Ryszard Kapuscinski.
Szymborska got the Nobel Prize for Literature for her poetry in 1996. In the meantime I read a few of her poems, but this book is for me the real introduction to her world. In this volume she bundled short book reviews. Reviews about books that mostly never get a review, but are readily bought by a wide range of readers.

At first I thought I’d be writing real reviews, that is, in each case I’d describe the nature of the book at hand, place it in some larger context, then give the reader to understand that it was better than some and worse than others. But I soon realized that I couldn’t write reviews and didn’t even want to. That basically I am and wish to remain a reader, an amateur, and a fan, unburdened by the weight of ceaseless evaluation.

The sketches, as she calls them, are fresh and lively. Very often I was surprised by some detail, some way of looking. And once and a while I thought: ‘why didn’t I think of this before? why didn’t I see this?’

Mrs. Dalloway had been waiting patiently for me, between all my other books. I had read other books written by Virginia Woolf — I have a distinct liking for her, as for other significant women. But not yet Mrs. Dalloway.
A few weeks ago I saw The Hours again, a touching film showing one day in the lives of three women (one of them is Virginia Woolf) and a poet. All this persons have some tie with Mrs. Dalloway, the novel.
So I took it from my shelves and started reading and didn’t stop.
Why did it impress me so much?
Because it was all impression itself. A kind of pointillistic novel, the way the action — no, there’s almost no action — the way the attention jumps from one person’s thoughts and impressions to another’s.
There is almost no direct speech, only things heard and thought about and remembered. But somehow this lack of action is capable of drama, of summing up lives. Something happened that day: the death of a poet. And for the other persons some sort of knowledge.
It is possible to know poetically.

→ Virginia Woolf