From Library Journal
Published years after Wat's death, this remarkable transcription of his taped memoirs sears the imagination. Like Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn, Wat records the life of a political prisoner with agonizing precision, texturing his recall with comic and compassionate portraits of his fellow prisoners and their guards. But Wat's genius lies beyond memorable evocation of place or even portraiture. His work is subtitled an "odyssey," and its true force transpires through the political and spiritual implications of his journeys among 13 Polish and Russian prisons during the 1930s and 1940s. Wat begins as a Communist and Jew and ends as an anti-Communist and Christian who still affirms his Jewishness. Above all, he defends his inner life against monstrous efforts to reduce it to time and trivia. Arthur Waldhorn, City Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
In
My Century the great Polish poet Aleksander Wat provides a spellbinding account of life in Eastern Europe in the midst of the terrible twentieth century. Based on interviews with Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz,
My Century describes the artistic, sexual, and political experimentation --in which Wat was a major participant-- that followed the end of World War I: an explosion of talent and ideas which, he argues, in some ways helped to open the door to the destruction that the Nazis and Bolsheviks soon visited upon the world. But Wat's book is at heart a story of spiritual struggle and conversion. He tells of his separation during World War II from his wife and young son, of his confinement in the Soviet prison system, of the night when the sound of far-off laughter brought on a vision of "the devil in history." "It was then," Wat writes, "that I began to be a believer."
