Needle’s Eye

A rich, polyphonic novel from one of the leading voices of contemporary Polish literature, encompassing a half-century of history and memory

In a Polish village, a young man watches an old man trip and fall down a flight of stairs. From this singular event arises a cascade of memories, regrets, and longings: the buried sensations of a whole lifetime, condensed and released. We hear of life during occupation, the scarcities of a childhood lived under the sign of war--and fragments of a home’s sounds and scents (the private speech of mothers and fathers, the treasures of coffee, raisins, almonds, and plums). There are loves unrequited and fulfilled, landscapes of winter and spring, old jobs and old friends, all flowing together.

Wieslaw Myśliwski’s latest novel is a personal epic written on the smallest scale. Its narrator, a medieval historian in his latter years, lives surrounded by images of the past. From within this wandering mind, Myśliwski has composed his own ode to lost time, a nonlinear, chameleonic meditation on a half-century of Polish life as it does not appear in the historical record. Part autobiography, part dreambook, Needle’s Eye is both a writer’s farewell to the Poland of his youth and an extended address, like the final lecture prepared by its narrator, on the persistence and necessity of memory.

Wieslaw Myśliwski is the only writer to have twice received the Nike Prize, Poland’s most prestigious literary award: in 1997 for his novel Horizon and again in 2007 for A Treatise on Shelling Beans. He worked as an editor at the People’s Publishing Cooperative and at the magazines Regiony and Sycyna. In addition to the Nike Prize, Myśliwski has received the Stanislaw Pietak Prize, the Arts Ministry Prize, the State Prize, the Reymont Prize, the Alfred Jurzykowski Foundation Award, and the Golden Sceptre Award.

Bill Johnston isProfessor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University. His translations include Witold Gombrowicz’s Bacacay; Magdalena Tulli’s Dreams and Stones, Moving Parts, Flaw, and In Red; Jerzy Pilch’s His Current Woman and The Mighty Angel; Stefan Żeromski’s The Faithful River; and Fado and Dukla by Andrzej Stasiuk. In 1999 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship for Translation. In 2008 he won the inaugural Found in Translation Award for Tadeusz Rozewicz’s new poems, and in 2012 he was awarded the PEN Translation Prize and Three Percent’s Best Translated Book Award for Myśliwski’s Stone Upon Stone.