Year of the Hunter Book

Some folks write journals for posterity, others give resonance to their own meandering deviation and hope for a loyal Brod: Byron to Renard.

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.

The year in the case is 1987-1988, during which the poet and Nobel prize winner Milosz lived in Berkeley, traveled to Paris, and generally annotated more Polish spellings than this Anglo mind could silently hope to pronounce. I learned about the factions amongst the literati of World War II dividing those who fled, those who stayed and published underground, those who were annihilated and whose who, like Milosz survived and paid the price of surviving. Interesting, the rivalries and misunderstandings, the problems with who translates what piece into which languages, his delight in his garden in Berkeley. He seemed to have shifted from a pretty difficult guy at the outset to a much more gentle and tolerant, albeit, old guy at the end of the year. The hunter? Himself.