Adam Zagajewski is ranked with Europe’s great living poets, but Slight Exaggeration is not a collection of verse. Rather, it’s an unconventional memoir written in snippets arranged in no apparent chronology. What surfaces about Zagajewski’s life is more allusive than what emerges about his way of thinking. In Slight Exaggeration, he argues eloquently against the flat irony of postmodernism and for admiration and enthusiasm in the humanities. He is opposed to isms and ideologies of any kind—any rigid system of thought that outlaws imagination and values vast abstractions over the particularities of human life and consciousness. Slight Exaggeration is a book that can be dipped into at random with great pleasure.
