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Loading... A Year of the Hunterby Czesław Miłosz
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  jonfaith | Feb 22, 2019 |  no reviews | add a review
Like Native Realm, Czeslaw Milosz's autobiography written thirty years earlier, A Year of the Hunter is a search for self-definition. A diary of one year in the Nobel laureate's life, 1987-88, it concerns itself as much with his experience of remembering - his youth in Wilno and the writers' groups of Warsaw and Paris; his life in Berkeley in the sixties; his time spent with poets and poetry - as with the actual events that shape his days. Throughout, Milosz tries to account for the discontinuity between the man he has become and the youth he remembers himself to have been. Shuttling between observations of the present and reconstructions of the past, he attempts to answer the unstated question: Given his poet's personality and his historical circumstances, has he managed to live his life decently? No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)891.8Literature Literature of other languages Literature of east Indo-European and Celtic languages West and South Slavic languages (Bulgarian, Slovene, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, and Macedonian)LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.13)
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Wikipedia in English
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I found this example to be an admixture, a conscious construction towards a legacy but one still wrought with doubts and misdeed.
There’s considerable judgement on display. Mourning for his wife. A quivering acknowledgement of his own destructive nature. There are trips back to Europe and lengthy asides.
There is no quick encapsulation of 20C Polish history. Milosz considers an attempt, if only through his own exceptional experience. I appreciate the reverence for Balzac, the prism of Magic Mountain to gauge the world between the wars; I did steady myself for his harsh words towards de Beauvoir and Brodsky.
I return again to the wonky confessional nature of the tome: regardless of its bent, it penetrates with verve of a poet at work. Early writing from his garden in Northern California, he notes that his childhood was virtually covered with insects, that his dotage thanks to chemical progress is free of such. Perhaps that is but another painful analogy for our age. (