YMMV / In Desert And Wilderness

• Critical Dissonance: It is continously an obligatory book to read in Polish education, keeping that status for generations, meaning it is considered by a whole lot of people at high places to be good and worth reading. Ask readers what they think and some will list it among the most boring books they had to read in their lives, with routine complains about flat characters.
  • It took all the way to 2024, over a century after the book entered curriculum, to reduce its presence to "only" fragments, while said fragments are still nearly half of the whole thing. And the reason cited was about Values Dissonance (hence trimming it down to more neutral bits), rather than the quality of the book itself.
• Cult Classic: The first film adaptation is still foundly remembered. The second, for contrast, is almost forgotten.
• Fair for Its Day: The book aged really badly when it comes to characters' morality and portray of non-white people (or Africa as a whole), while it was a standard fare adventure book when it came out. One can only wonder how Sienkiewicz, coming from a place with no colonies and ruled by foreign overlords, could write a book glorifying colonialism and imperialism.
• Funny Moments: Kali provides quite a few but probably the most iconic is his morality.
  Stas: Tell me, Kali, what is a bad deed?
  Kali: When somebody steal cow from Kali.
  Stas: Correct. Now what is a good deed?
  Kali: When Kali steal cow from somebody.
  • Made twice funny by the fact that Kali takes a short while to think over his first answer but drops the second one without slightest hesitation.
• Irony: Sienkiewicz is (in)famous for writing The Trilogy to "lift up hearts". He was living long after Poland was divided and ruled by foreign powers and removed from maps, as a citizen of Russia. Yet in this book he has zero remorse toward partiotic uprising and opposing foreign invasion^note the very theme of The Deluge, treats rebels as scum of the Earth, while colonial powers and their imperialism is glorified to no end. Since both In Desert And Wilderness and The Trilogy are obligatory books in Polish curriculum, try to imagine the mental gymnastics required to handle this in school.
  • To give credit where it is due, Sienkiewicz does bring up this point: there is a scene where Mr Tarkowski is stated to be quite troubled by that, but stays silent out of a sense of courtesy towards Mr Rawlinson. But since it's mentioned about nowhere else in the book, you would be forgiven for missing it.
• Memetic Mutation: In Polish culture, a moral Double Standard is known as "Kali's morality". It comes from a scene in which Staś attempts to teach Kali about Christian morality (with some White Man's Burden and Insane Troll Logic along the way): bad is when somebody steals from Kali, says Kali. And good, asks Staś? Good, Kali answers, is when Kali steals from somebody.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Due to the way how grammatical gender and names^note With a few exceptions, names ending in -a are girl names work in Polish, most people take Saba to be female. It's mentioned once as a male mastiff.
  • Indeed, the book made Saba quite popular dog name in Poland and most dogs who bear the name are female.
  • Actually, in Polish forms of verb and adjective indicate the gender of a subject, so it's pretty clear that Saba is male in almost every sentence that mentions him. The confusion probably applies to the people who didn't actually read the book.

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