Ten years after Widnokrąg / Horizon comes the latest novel from Wiesław Myśliwski. In a monologue addressed to a mysterious stranger, the narrator sums up his whole life. To what extent did he influence his fate himself, and how far was it shaped by the traumatic events of his childhood and the meanders of Poland's history? Myśliwski's novel is a kind of meditation on the role of destiny and chance in human lives. A beautiful, wise book that readers will want to return to.
Traktat o łuskaniu fasoli / A Treatise on Shelling Beans caused a substantial stir even before its launch. "Wiesław Myśliwski is the opposite of a star - he does not appear on television and does not entertain crowds. He simply thinks and writes beautiful novels", wrote Dariusz Nowacki in the 30 April 2006 issue of Newsweek.
The book won the 2007 Nike Literary Award.
When asked by Zdzisław Pietrasik of the Polityka weekly about the book's intriguing title, the author replied:
The shelling of beans troubled me for 30 years, I would say. As you know, this was a form of neighbourly meetings when people would shell beans and at the same time talk about all topics under the sun. The conversations were about current events and old times, dreams, ghosts, this world and the next, God, individual and collective experiences, people would play the wise guy, philosophise, in other words there were no limits, words led people in all kinds of directions. Everybody took part, women and men, old and young people, even children. Sometimes I think to myself, perhaps beans were only planted in great amounts for this very purpose, because I can't remember eating beans all that much. And when I remembered this custom from my childhood, I started thinking how to translate the verbal structure of the custom into the structure of writing a book", Wiesław Myśliwski told the weekly's reporter.
Polityka 17/18, 29 April-6 May 2006
Janusz Rudnicki wrote about A Treatise... in the Twórczość monthly magazine (January 2007):
This treatise is a long river of a monologue. (The river is called the Rutka). One man tells the story, another man listens (let's say it's another man). The storyteller has no name, neither does the listener. The storyteller speaks. About life in general, about his life, about himself. For instance about how a hatter once said to him, "'You simply feel strange in yourself, you bump into yourself in yourself, you don't fit in with yourself, so to speak". The storyteller is happiest when he's all alone in the boat, so alone that he is outside himself: "I lay on the bottom and felt as if I wasn't anywhere. And if you were to ask me if I was ever happy, that was the only time".
Source: www.znak.com.pl/book