Needle's Eye
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- € 13,99
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- € 13,99
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A rich, polyphonic novel from one of the leading voices of contemporary Polish literature, encompassing a half-century of history and memory
In a Polish village, a young man watches an old man trip and fall down a flight of stairs. From this singular event arises a cascade of memories, regrets, and longings: the buried sensations of a whole lifetime, condensed and released. We hear of life during occupation, the scarcities of a childhood lived under the sign of war—and fragments of a home’s sounds and scents (the private speech of mothers and fathers, the treasures of coffee, raisins, almonds, and plums). There are loves unrequited and fulfilled, landscapes of winter and spring, old jobs and old friends, all flowing together.
Wiesław Myśliwski’s latest novel is a personal epic written on the smallest scale. Its narrator, a medieval historian in his latter years, lives surrounded by images of the past. From within this wandering mind, Myśliwski has composed his own ode to lost time, a nonlinear, chameleonic meditation on a half-century of Polish life as it does not appear in the historical record. Part autobiography, part dreambook, Needle’s Eye is both a writer’s farewell to the Poland of his youth and an extended address, like the final lecture prepared by its narrator, on the persistence and necessity of memory.
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The labyrinthine latest by Myśliwski (A Treatise on Shelling Beans) reckons with mortality and Polish history. The unnamed narrator, a young man employed in a canning factory not long after WWII, is out on the street in his hometown of Sandomierz. He has a brief and vague conversation about love and regrets with an elderly man, who suddenly trips and falls to his death down a flight of decrepit stairs. A Kafkaesque scene ensues, in which the narrator, the only witness, is interrogated by a gnomic police detective ("The truth, as you know, has the highest price," the cop tells him, unhelpfully). The ordeal triggers the narrator's early memories of the war and his high school years in its aftermath, when his family moves into an empty house in a former Jewish ghetto and he meets a Roma classmate who reads his palm and says he'll die that year. The Needle's Eye of the title is an old Dominican gate, part of the medieval defensive walls in Sandomierz. The narrow passage inspires the narrator to pursue a degree in medieval history and eventually become a historian. Unfolding in an eloquent and slow-moving monologue, the novel sustains an intimate mood even as the narrator muses on existential matters ("Life means stumbling after yourself without any hope that you'll ever find yourself"). Fans of modernist fiction will find much to admire.
