Wiesław Myśliwski took out the Best Translated Book Award back in 2012 with Stone upon Stone, and the Polish writer looks certain to be in the running this year too. Once again, Archipelago Books have brought us a wonderful piece of translated fiction, one which will no doubt find its way onto many shelves (and e-readers) in the months to come. The big question though is whether Myśliwski's new book has what it takes to pull off a repeat victory - let's have a look, shall we?
*****
A Treatise on Shelling Beans (translated by Bill Johnston, e-copy courtesy of the publishers) is a conversation between an old man, the caretaker of a collection of holiday cabins by a lake, and a mysterious visitor, one who has come to ask for some beans. What starts as a simple request turns into a long rambling monologue in which the old man expounds on life, music, memory - and beans, of course. As he rattles on, painting names back on to faded nameplates, we begin to feel a sense of unease. Why is he bringing up the past? What is he really doing in this isolated part of the country? Just who is this stranger anyway - and what has actually brought him to the old man's door? The reader senses that it isn't really for a handful of beans...
A Treatise on Shelling Beans is one long, fluent, engaging monologue, albeit rambling and tangential at times. The unnamed storyteller is the archetypal unreliable narrator, and as he continues spinning his yarns, the reader is focused not just on the content of his tales but also on how much we can trust him:
"I liked children, I still do, as I said. But I didn't want any of my own. Why not? I'll leave it to you to figure out. Me, I might not tell the truth."
p.248 (Archipelago Books, 2013)
Which is a bit of a problem - as his is the only voice we hear, we're pretty much at his mercy.
Of course, where there's a speaker, there's usually a listener, and the character known only as the visitor fills that role in this novel. With the story told in the first person (by a man who barely pauses for breath), it would be fairly difficult to learn much about the interlocutor, but it's as if Myśliwski goes out of his way to keep the identity of the visitor a secret. The reader is reduced to hunting for clues in the old man's stories, wondering if the request for beans, or his skill at a game involving a matchbox is a clue as to his identity...
However, for the most part, our attention is dragged back to the old man, as it's easier to piece together a picture of his life from the stories he weaves. Going right back to his childhood, he uses the request for beans as a springboard into his youth, painting a picture of a family in the country sitting around each evening shelling happily away. He then moves on to his later life, telling of his experiences at a boarding school, his training as an electrician and his time playing the saxophone in bands (both at home and abroad). The stories always seem to be fragmentary, and it takes a while for the reader to cotton on to what is missing from the picture - the war.
It takes a while to get there but, as we suspect, there is a dark side to the novel, a tragic background which casts new light on the rest of the old man's stories:
"People often think, what could possibly have changed in a place where they've grown beans since forever. But how did you manage to hold on to the conviction that there are timeless places like that? That I can't understand. Didn't you know that places like to mislead us? Everything misleads us, it's true. But places more than anything. If it weren't for these nameplates I myself wouldn't know that this was the place."
p.9 (Archipelago Books, 2013)
Behind this seemingly innocuous statement lies the key to the novel - what happened in the village during the war...
Myśliwski also dwells on the idea of memory, and like his narrator, it's a concept that he doesn't regard as entirely reliable:
"I don't know if you agree, but in my view memory is like light that's streaming toward us from a long-dead star. Or even just from a kerosene lamp. Except it's not always able to reach us during our lifetime. It depends how far it has to travel and how far away from it we are. Because those two things aren't the same. Actually, it may be that everything in general is memory. The whole of this world of ours ever since it's existed. Including the two of us here, these dogs. Whose memory? That I don't know." (p.32)
In the old man's eyes, the past is a creation, a tale made up of subjective memories - simply a collection of stories. Of course, the thing with stories is that the way they unfold depends on who's telling them, and it's very possible that a different voice will have a very different view of events.
As with the previous English-language release, Bill Johnston has done a great job of capturing the unique tone of the old man, in a style which, while similar to that of Stone upon Stone, is also recognisably different. Again, the language used is simple and uncomplicated on the whole, but with several stories within the main one, it's important that each of these also stands out - and they do. These stories are expertly drawn out, and the tension is often palpable, even when the actual content is something as innocuous as watching a film about a man who wants to buy a hat. Trust me - it's much more subtle than it sounds ;)
On finishing the book, my first thought was that it didn't quite grab me as much as Stone upon Stone. The story meanders a lot, and I was constantly searching for the central thread, the elusive glue that holds it all together. However, a week later, I'm still thinking about it (which is, of course, a good thing). I suspect that this is a book which will benefit from rereading, one which only gives up its secrets slowly and unwillingly; the lack of an obvious plot may actually benefit the novel when it comes to be reread. After all, what's important is not what we read, but how we remember it, a very different thing indeed:
"Besides, what is memory if not the pretense that you remember. Though it's our only witness to having existed. We depend on memory the way a forest depends on trees, a river on its banks. More - if you ask me, we're created by memory. Not just us, the whole world." (p.355)
Perhaps Myśliwski's chances of a BTBA repeat aren't that bad after all...
After all the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize business was completed, I was planning to read the winner of the Best Translated Book Award, to see how the two laureates compared. Of course, that idea was shelved when the BTBA winner turned out to be Satantango, a book I'd already reviewed... Instead, I turned back to 2012, to see how last year's American choice matched up to the IFFP winner, Blooms of Darkness. Seconds out, it's round two in the IFFP-BTBA duel of champions ;)
*****
Wiesław Myśliwski's Stone upon Stone (translated by Bill Johnston, published by Archipelago Books) is a hefty novel, but a surprisingly smooth read. It consists of eight thematic chapters, all narrated by Szymek Pietruszka, an elderly farmer in the Polish provinces. In effect, the book is a lengthy monologue, one in which Szymek tells stories about life, land and family - and he certainly knows how to tell a story...
From the initial tale of his struggles to find the time, money and materials to build a family tomb, Szymek takes us on a trip through time, recounting stories of his days in the Polish resistance during the Second World War. While it's difficult to keep the narrator on a path free of digressions, the patient reader is eventually rewarded with more glimpses of what came between the end of the war and his current situation. If Szymek appears to be a lonely old man stuck on a farm in the middle of nowhere, there are reasons for the way he has ended up.
Szymek is a man heading towards the end of his life, and his stories help us to see how society has progressed in his home country. While modern comforts have made life a little easier, on the whole, Szymek thinks life has gone downhill since his youth. The best example of this comes from the chapter 'The Road', where the newly-surfaced route through the village allows people to drive to neighbouring towns in comfort. Unfortunately, the farmers now find it hard to get their horses and carriages across the road with the harvest (traffic lights were obviously a later invention...):
"There's no more peace to be had in our village. Nothing but cars and cars and cars. It's like they built the road for cars alone and forgot about the people. But are there only cars living in the world? Maybe a time'll come when there won't be any more people, only cars. Then I hope the damn things'll kill each other. I hope they have wars, worse than human wars. I hope they hate each other and fight and curse each other. Till one day maybe a Car God will appear, and it'll make him angry and he'll drown the lot of them."
pp.67/8 (Archipelago Books, 2010)
The narrator (and perhaps the writer) also feels uneasy about the loss of connection with the land. In his father's day, the land was everything, coming before school, illness or hunger, and it was the farmer's duty to tend to it - man is short-lived, but the land goes on forever. When the war starts, Szymek's father uses this as an excuse to try to stop his son leaving the farm:
"What do we have to fight about? We plow and plant and mow, are we in anyone's way? War won't change the world. People'll just go off and kill each other, then afterwards it'll be the same as it was before. And as usual it'll be us country folk that do most of the dying. And nobody will even remember that we fought, or why. Because when country folks die they don't leave monuments and books behind, only tears. They rot in the land, and even the land doesn't remember them. If the land was going to remember everyone it would have to stop giving birth to new life. But the land's job is to give birth." (p.156)
However, now it is the land's duty to make man a profit, and the farmers follow whatever trend will make the most money in the shortest time, even if this has negative long-term consequences. Fields are sown with unsuitable (but lucrative) crops, and liberal sprinklings of nitrates are used to increase yields. Worst of all, the younger folk are abandoning their homes for the city, leaving the land to the mercy of the old and frail.
While the land plays an important role, the heart of the book is the enigmatic Szymek though, and it is his personal story which fascinates us. Despite his measured, friendly tone, we gradually learn that he's not quite as nice as he may appear at first glance. He's a drinker, a fighter, a user of women, a man we shouldn't really warm to. He's a charismatic old bloke though, and he does have redeeming features (quite apart from his war hero status) and the more we learn, the more we understand about why he grew up that way, and why he is still alone...
Stone Upon Stone is an excellent read, and a fairly easy one at that. I wolfed it down in four days (not bad for around 560 pages), and that is due in part to the fairly simple language used in the book. In the excellent interview with Scott Esposito (available as a Two Voices podcast), Bill Johnston talks about how the key to translating the book into English was finding the right way to bring Szymek's voice across into the new language. His solution was to avoid complex Latin-based words, sticking with simpler Germanic-based vocabulary. Whether that's the reason for the success or not, the voice definitely works.
Whether you're interested in twentieth-century Poland or just a sucker for a good story, this is a book for you. Szymek's rambling tales, with digression following digression until the chapter (and, eventually, the whole book) comes full circle, are entertaining and thought-provoking, whether they are stories of joyous drunken rampages or suspense-filled moments in the cold, Polish forests, waiting for the enemy to appear. In the end, it's a book about life - but one, that begins, and ends, with the inescapable image of a tomb...
...that is, if he can get the cement.
*****
In terms of BTBA v IFFP then, I'd have to say that the score is 2-0 to the American prize. While the 2013 contest was a close one, with Satantango just edging out The Detour in a battle of very, very different styles (Krasznahorkai's never-ending sentences against Bakker's stripped-back prose), the 2012 bout was a no-contest. I have made no secret of the fact that Aharon Appelfeld's Blooms of Darkness was one of my least favourite books on the 2012 IFFP shortlist, and Stone Upon Stone is simply a far better novel.
I quite like the idea of a transatlantic translation showdown - watch out for more BTBA-IFFP battles in the future ;)
