Finished Stone Upon Stone (translated from the original Polish by Bill Johnston) and said something like “whoa, great book.” The title is perfect — per the epigram it’s from a folk song: “stone upon stone / on stone a stone / and on that stone / another stone.” A perfect title because it’s a simple introduction to the novel’s alinear associative structure/progress across the clear-cut beginning, middle, and end of a few eras — the narrator’s pre-war youth of mostly satisfying work in the fields, fighting in the resistance during WWII, and the post-war soviet era marked by administrative work, excessive drinking, and chasing women.
Like the book I read before this one (Buddenbrooks), it light-handedly dramatizes dramatic societal shifts occurring over a few decades — in this, the blacksmith’s sons repair TVs.
The present scenes, whenever the narrator Syzmek comes up for air after dunking his head in the river of the past, involve building a tomb. Each anecdote amounts to a virtual stone Syzmek uses to construct this tomb of a book, divided into nine long chapters, two or three of which are masterpieces.
The chapters “Land,” “Hallelujah,” and most of “Bread” supplied exactly the sort of thing you hope to find when you open a 534-page dense peri-WWII not-western-Euro novel published by the great Archipelago Books: disputes over boundaries between fields, near-fatal beatings, in-depth descriptions of various war wounds, drinking binges and deceitful drunks, all sorts of earthly desires and earthly horrors — why fear hell when we’ve lived through so much on earth, sexiness and sorrows, a virtuoso accordion player who used to play crazy amazing improvisations at funerals hanged by the Germans with his bandmates (they hanged his accordion too), sumptuous passages about some wartime respite with a lovely young lady completed with an off-hand phrase like “before they burned her,” an isolated town in the woods burned and everyone hanged, wonderful steady scenes of slow careful courtship and desire fulfilled before happiness is wrenched back by miscommunication and violence, the best descriptions of scythe-work/threshing since Levin in Anna Karenina, a locked iron gate leading to nowhere in the middle of a field, a simile involving turning into a snake to wrap around a neck and hang someone from the nearest tree.
Fantastic soliloquies, especially by a pretzel seller early on about her many husbands, by an administrator later on about the ways of the world, and later by a long-time lover about everything and nothing that delivers the moral of the story, and toward the end an awesome semi-querulous Q&A with a priest about the ways of men, women, God, and the afterworld wherein Syzmek stands his ground and defends his hard-won wisdom against accusations of sin and heresy, rejecting easy consolation.
All angles organically covered: love, hate, life, death, joy, sorrow, sex, solitude, work, play, war, peace, life on earth and the afterlife, the life of the body and life of the mind — even a little light metafiction at the end about the language of everyday objects.
All in all, an excellent novel — not for everyone of course since it’s hardcore Euro Lit, associatively structured, rangy sentences, replete with paragraphless pages and subcharacters with too many consonants in their names, no easy conclusions other than the certainty of moral ambiguity and always coming down on the side of life, more life, you have to live!
If there’s any moral to the story, it’s that: you have to live, even if decisions don’t make life easier. How else do you become wise to the ways of the world?
Represents and revels in the complexity of everything, including life’s simplicities, and reeks therefore of the best sort of lit.
Mysliwski’s a little like the better-known Bohumil Hrabal but without as obvious a smile of his face and maybe a little more reckless for stretches (these aren’t criticisms of either writer). If this sort of thing is your thing, this one’s highly recommended.
Won the 2012 “Best Translated Book” award, if you’d prefer to take an official organ’s word for it.