Today, bestselling Yale historian Timothy Snyder is headlining a Brooklyn launch event for the new translation of Miron Białoszewski’s A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising. How Snyder, a leading New Cold Warrior, will fit it into his generic East European nationalism is unknown, although he’ll undoubtedly come up with something clever.

But Białoszewski’s Memoir is one of those square pegs for which every preconceived schema is a round hole. The book’s own preface described it as “distinctly annoying” when it came out in 1970, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s disjointed, repetitious, and downright boring for long stretches at a time. Białoszewski had a thing for sentence fragments as well as a determination to describe events exactly as he remembered them no matter how jumbled and confused.

Here he is, for example, on the subject of the Luftwaffe: