• A Treatise on Shelling Beans
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Archipelago Books

A Treatise on Shelling Beans

A Treatise on Shelling Beans

by Wiesław Myśliwski, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston

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Our narrator, a retired musician, receives a visit from an enigmatic stranger who inspires him to share the story of his long and stormy life. We listen spellbound as he tells of a happy country childhood brutally cut short by World War II; harsh schooling in an institution for orphaned children; his experiences as an electrician on postwar building sites; life abroad playing saxophone in a dance band; and an eventual return to a childhood home transformed by the tempestuous century he has lived through. Replete with drama, mystery, wisdom, and humor, and told in the grand oral tradition of Mysliwski’s celebrated Stone Upon Stone, the novel’s masterfully interwoven stories and anecdotes build into a magnificent portrait of a man and his times. By turns poignant and hilarious, A Treatise on Shelling Beans is an epic recounting of a life that is anything but ordinary.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781935744900
Pages: 450
Publication Date:

Praise

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.
—The Quarterly Conversation

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

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.
—Los Angeles Review of Books

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