Widmo Brockenu

I’ll admit: I wasn’t prepared for how *unflinching* *Widmo Brockenu* would feel in audio form. Gosztyła’s performance is so intimately tied to Forst’s psyche that there were moments I had to pause—not because the pacing dragged (it doesn’t), but because the rawness of his delivery made me complicit in Forst’s spiral. Take the scene where he attempts to climb again, only to freeze mid-route: Gosztyła’s breath becomes shallow, his cadence stuttering, and suddenly you’re *there*, gripping the rock face with him. It’s immersive in a way text alone couldn’t achieve. That said, the audiobook isn’t without its stumbles. The flashbacks to the accident are *too* abrupt in audio—what reads as a jarring cut on the page feels like a production misstep when heard, especially in Chapter 7, where the shift from present to past lacks a sonic cue (a faint echo, a pitch drop) to signal the transition. And while Mróz’s sparse dialogue is effective, some exchanges between Forst and his estranged daughter suffer from Gosztyła’s deliberate pacing; the silence between lines, meant to convey tension, occasionally saps the scenes of urgency. Still, these are quibbles. The real triumph here is how the audiobook transforms Forst’s isolation into something *physical*—the way the wind in the mountains howls through the recording, the way Gosztyła’s voice cracks on the word *“przepraszam”* like it’s being torn from him. If you’ve ever loved a book that *hurts* in the right ways, this is your next listen.