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 Wiesław Myśliwski, 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.

An unforgettable voice. The tone of the narrator is highly amusing, human, and perceptive.

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 Myśliwski novel, A Treatise on Shelling Beans [...], which deserves as much attention, if not more.

Praise for Stone Upon Stone:

Joyously anchored in the physical world, steeped in storytelling, a delight from start to finish.

Myśliwski never takes a false narrative step, because on this flowing narrative river of a road, there can be no such thing as a false step.

A seamless epic . . . Fresh and surprising . . . Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz said that the poem that praises beauty must swallow all of death, and Stone Upon Stone does just that: illuminating the balance of beauty and brutality that defines our existence. . . . When Szymek says, 'The whole world is one big language,' we believe it. We cup our ears to listen. . . . That Stone Upon Stone reads like the grand novel it is, not a novel in translation, is a testament to Johnston's work and Mysliwski's singular vision.

A hymn in praise of life.

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.

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 voice--sometimes 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?'

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.

Exhilarating . . . In long, streaming paragraphs, Szymek recounts a life that is full of sorrow and happiness. He talks about everything a life can contain: lovers, drinking, war, death, accidents, experience . . . A dizzying array of memories and stories.

This 500+ page novel will reward the patient reader with a remarkably detailed understanding of postwar life in rural Poland and, by extension, the human condition in general.

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...

[Myśliwski's prose] is vividly concrete, blazing with precise physical details, and brusque (though never the less acute) even when it comes to thorny philosophical questions.