Praise
Joyously anchored in the physical world, steeped in storytelling, a delight from start to finish.
— Kirkus Reviews
Sweeping . . . irreverent . . With winning candor . . . Pietruszka chronicles the modernization of rural Poland and celebrates the persistence of desire.
— The New Yorker
A marvel of narrative seduction, a rare double masterpiece of storytelling and translation. . . . Myลliwski's prose, replete with wit and an almost casual intensity, skips nimbly from one emotional register to the next, carrying dramatic force. . . . He manages tone so finely, orchestrating a perfect continuity between the tragic and the comic and, ultimately, between life and death. . . . In his translation Bill Johnston navigates Myลliwski's modulations with skill and the lightness of touch that is generally the face of profound labour.
— Times Literary Supplement
Stone Upon Stone is the first masterpiece in Slavic literature, perhaps even in European literature, in which the fate of the peasant attains the standing of human fate in all its tragic vastness.
— Anna Tatarkiewicz
Like a more agrarian Beckett, a less gothic Faulkner, a slightly warmer Laxness, Mysliwski masterfully renders in Johnston's gorgeous translation (Mysliwski's first into English) life in a Polish farming village before and after WWII. . . . Richly textured and wonderfully evocative, the novel renders Szymus as a distinctly memorable character, whose humor and hard-earned wisdom lend beauty to a bleak vision of a land destroyed by war and ravaged by history, and whose voiceโsometimes warm, sometimes ornery, always elegiac--is undeniably original, his digressions and ruminations forming a story that reminds us that 'words are a great grace. When it comes down to it, what are you given other than words?'
— Publishers Weekly, starred
A marvelous, garrulous book ... The grandest example of a genre ... Szymek's rustic voice narrates with a naivete and an eloquence that are equally endearing, reaching into every corner of the Polish countryside like a great shining sun.
— The National
This chopped and fractured narrative is not the winking, postmodern self-consciousness but a capturing of the true way people tell their stories. Feeling at times like a confession, this is another masterstroke by the acclaimed Polish author Wiesลaw Myลliwski, that he captures what is normally haphazard improvisation with a grace that feels familiar, realistic, and controlled. His remarkable translator, Bill Johnston, matches him step for step.
— The Quarterly Conversation
Stone Upon Stone, which was first published in 1984, appeared in translation from the indispensable Bill Johnston via the equally indispensable Archipelago Books. The novel won the PEN Translation Prize in 2012. In late 2013, Archipelago and Johnston released their second Myลliwski novel, A Treatise on Shelling Beans [...], which deserves as much attention, if not more.
— Los Angeles Review of Books
The labyrinthine latest by Myลliwski reckons with mortality and Polish history . . . Unfolding in an eloquent and slow-moving monologue, the novel sustains an intimate mood . . . Fans of modernist fiction will find much to admire.
Myลliwski's reluctance to name his protagonists creates an omniscient, impersonal narrative that sweeps readers along, at times uncertain of the who or the when, but savoring the flurry of memories . . . Timelines are layered like an Escher painting, linking beginnings and ends, expressing both the unity and continuity of nature.
