Volume 37, Number 12 · July 19, 1990
In God's Playground
By John Bayley
Lucifer Unemployed
by Aleksander Wat, translated by Lillian Vallee, foreword by Czeslaw Milosz
Northwestern University Press, 123 pp., $8.95 (paper)
Killing the Second Dog
by Marek Hlasko, translated by Tomasz Mirkowicz
Cane Hill Press, 117 pp., $8.95 (paper)
Missing Pieces
by Stanislaw Benski, translated by Walter Arndt
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book, 160 pp., $19.95
Bohin Manor
by Tadeusz Konwicki, translated by Richard Lourie
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 240 pp., $19.95
Rondo
by Kazimierz Brandys, translated by Jaroslaw Anders
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 265 pp., $19.95
The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman
by Andrzej Szczypiorski, translated by Klara Glowczewska
Grove Weidenfeld, 204 pp., $16.95
Joseph Conrad once wrote to an English friend enquiring, rather querulously, 'What is all this about Jane Austen?' Conrad could not see the point of Jane Austen, nor was his friend able to enlighten him: indeed, it sounds rather as if the skepticism of the great Polish-English novelist made the friend himself begin to wonder whether there could really be anything in Jane Austen's novels after all. No other literary form is so instinctively and involuntarily national, perhaps because nationalism was a growing force when the novel entered its dominant period.
Review, 2844 words
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