Review Summaries

• It is widely received favorably, valued as a long novel sustained by narrative force and a strong sense of lived experience.

Reviews

• Reading this book is like floating down a river on a hot summer’s day. Generally, you drift slowly, enjoying the lost pastoral scenes so vividly brought to life, then a sudden cascade of history briefly takes you, then the calm surface returns and continues. Direct, common sense monologue, some dialogue, with humour or at least absurdity always near at hand. At times you will wonder whether certain passing or even important facts will be explained (answer: not always), but you are really just following the oral meanderings of a perfectly wrought narrative voice, a character who seems present in person, revealing in time all you need to know.

• It is very rare for books touching real life in that extent, that there is not much of a difference between the reader and the read.

• I am a Pole,so I read the original version (and excuse my English )) You just need to read it, so that Your life has become fuller It won't give You any simple answers, but makes You see the world with it's beauty and "wyrozumienie" (I'm trying to be carefull with words that can seem pompous but this book feels me up with feelings of pain,love and beauty of the world,some peace and acceptation of it,and myself as the hero says says " ..and there was no way he spoke, but I will not interfere him because he spoke truer than it was" he writes one book per 10 years. just a few novels.But I read them over and over open on any page he understands me better than I do tells the words which are inside me,just I can't find them with no judgment,no cheap feelings,no teaching,no mercy plane life,with a touch of loving forbearance

• Stone Upon Stone is written as an extended monologue, providing the strong unified focus of one man's (a reluctant peasant farmer's) perception of the world around him as it tears itself apart through the Second World War and the takeover of Poland by the Communists. He illustrates how his beliefs and values lead to his actions, staying true to himself and struggling against adversity and catastrophe, struggling to live. A book about hardships, knavery and heroism; about isolation, loss and death. And the stupidity of war, and of Governments and their minions. But also about life. A dark book, a big book with big themes. The book won a prize for best translation in the year it was published.

• As a Slavophile, I am continually on the look out for new opportunities to read writers from east of the Oder. Russian literature tends to dominate my book shelves and I have read and reread Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Chekhov amongst others. Lately I have been purposely seeking out Polish authors. And after delving into the great poets like Milosz, Herbert, Zagejewski and the always amazing Szymborska, I have found the novels of Wiesław Myśliwski. Stone Upon Stone is a novel that blends traditional storytelling with a kind of stream of consciousness. Kind of. The main character Szymek is the 20th century anti-hero, the son of a farmer who wanders and haphazardly confesses himself through his unwinding and wandering tale. The books is divided into thematic sections from 'Cemetery' to 'Mother' to 'Weeping' and 'Gateway' with others in-between. I will say this: the novel does not follow a typical A to B to Z kind of narration. This is not a David Copperfield approach. No. Rather, the reader is floating around in Szymek's memories that veer between the banal and harowing, thoughts and more thoughts and events and moments meandering along. Descriptions of the war years are exciting and painful. These episodes were gripping, the pages fly by, you are on the edge of your seat, you shake your head reading about Szymek escaping execution to fleeing from a surprise attack in a village. These moments imprint themselves upon the reader. Great literature, here. It was the banal moments that bogged down the book. There are longeurs and not all of them are negative. At times the banal moments, that is the mundane interactions were fascinating and riveting as Myśliwski captures the voices of characters that Szymek interacts with. Sometimes a characters goes on a kind of monologue and you are lost in their perspectives and externally-voiced debates. More great literature. Other times, the banal moments were tiring. For instance, towards the end of the novel Szymek is looking for his younger brother. There is a whole sequence where he interacts with his fellow villagers. Here, I will admit, I found myself scanning the conversations as they rarely added anything to the narrative and it felt like filler. I'll be honest, I kept thinking: is this necessary? Could we have excised this or abbreviated a bit more. There are 500 plus pages here. Take out the longeurs would have resulted in perhaps 400 phenomenal pages. Szymek reminded me of a Polish Bardamu from Céline's Journey to the End of the Night. His thoughts and adventures are so human. There are beautiful passages, beautiful descriptions about relationships, about the landscape, about family and Christianity. This is a book I would highly recommend to readers of world literature. Otherwise for readers that want a traditionally-structured story, the recommendation comes with a caveat. Yet I am so unbelievably fortunate to have read this book that I will definitely return to in the future.

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