Wiesław Myśliwski

A Treatise On Shelling Beans

Excerpt

This is the fifth novel by Wiesław Myśliwski, a leading writer with origins in the rural tradition, but whose work is far from run-of-the-mill folklore. Myśliwski rarely publishes, but his books are always heavyweight. He writes about the meaning of life in an era of great cultural change, about human fate as a chronicle that requires interpreting and understanding. The hero and narrator of this novel is an ageing man who works as the caretaker for a group of summer cottages and tells a visitor  – a character who is never revealed to the reader and may be purely symbolic – the story of his own life from his village childhood during the war right through to old age. This account in itself could serve as food for thought on the power of the spoken word when passed from one person to another. Myśliwski’s work includes everything: the ups and downs of the hero’s life and some moral pointers and adages all appear within a long oration that is in search of an understanding listener.
Everything that happens to the hero in his life, including a happy childhood cut short by the war, the mass murder of his family, how he hid from the Nazis in a potato heap, his post-war job working as an electrician and also his amateur musical education, his experiences with politics and love, his encounters with life’s teachers, his travels abroad and finally his role at the summer resort, all provide the opportunity to express some general conclusions that put his personal fortunes in order and make sense of them.
So Myśliwski’s man lives among people, events and things, which at first sight look ordinary, but soon take on symbolic meaning; human existence is all about reading the signs and recognising the order of life. The writer demands the same of his reader, to whom he presents his hero’s fate like a huge conundrum that has to be solved by comparing the facts and situations, and crucially, being aware of life’s ethical dimension.

Jerzy Jarzębski

Wiesław Myśliwski (born 1932) is a writer and playwright, and was the first winner of Poland's most important literary award - the NIKE - in 1997. Myśliwski's work has been called one of the finest examples of rustic literature, but its philosophical and anthropological significance goes far beyond this category.