From Publishers Weekly
It would be difficult to overstate the brilliance and breadth of vision of this Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet and prose writer. This collection, spanning five decades, demonstrates an uncommon rigor, respect for truth and refusal to bend to intellectual fashion. While Milosz (The Captive Mind, etc.) an exile since 1951 and a professor of Slavic languages and literature at UC Berkeley has the trappings of a traditional European man of letters, he brings a unique modern perspective to topics of longstanding intellectual debate, including belief in God, poetry's social relevance and the limitations of Western liberalism. His adventurous, varied prose style calls upon different literary traditions: sketches, letters, aphorisms and philosophical essays. Underlying Milosz's writing is the constant, pained consciousness of having lived through WWII and the Holocaust, during which time he experienced a spiritual crisis as a Catholic which does not seem fully resolved (his favorite philosophers are the contradictory Simone Weil and Lev Shestov). From his harsh judgment of himself ("to preserve an untarnished image of [one]self is rarely possible") to his meditations on the nature of evil ("purely bestial sadism, naked and plain, occurs much more rarely than motivated sadism, equipped with all the arguments needed to make it into a noble and positive inclination"), Milosz's thoughts stem from the pressure that reality exerts on theory. Even in moments of relative levity ("America... has always suffered from a certain weakness in historical imagination... which is perhaps why in American films both ancient Romans and astronauts from the year 3000 look and act like boys from Kentucky"), a seriousness of purpose predominates. Seven of these pieces are translated into English for the first time, helping to make this indispensable reading.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Winner of the Nobel prize in literature in 1980, poet Milosz (Road-Side Dog, Milosz's ABC), has long made the experience of Poland in the past harsh century the keystone of his writing. In this collection of his essays and other prose, containing material spanning from 1942 to 1998, he writes of life in Wilno, Paris, Warsaw, and California with poignant insight and describes his friends in all these places sensitively and honestly. The difficult conditions of exile and the passage of time are constant themes in Milosz's work, along with considerations of the European mind, the Catholic faith, humanism, and the collective nature of humanity's struggles. He approaches these varied and rich subjects through personal memoirs, biographies of friends, and thoughts gained from philosophy, literature, and writing. The essays on Jerzy Andrzejewski, Robinson Jeffers, Simone Weil, Lev Shestov, and Polish poetry are major statements of this great writer's beliefs. Highly recommended for literature collections.
- Gene Shaw, NYPL
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Gene Shaw, NYPL
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
