Needle’s Eye

The labyrinthine latest by Myśliwski (A Treatise on Shelling Beans) reckons with mortality and Polish history. The unnamed narrator, a young man employed in a canning factory not long after WWII, is out on the street in his hometown of Sandomierz. He has a brief and vague conversation about love and regrets with an elderly man, who suddenly trips and falls to his death down a flight of decrepit stairs. A Kafkaesque scene ensues, in which the narrator, the only witness, is interrogated by a gnomic police detective (“The truth, as you know, has the highest price,” the cop tells him, unhelpfully). The ordeal triggers the narrator’s early memories of the war and his high school years in its aftermath, when his family moves into an empty house in a former Jewish ghetto and he meets a Roma classmate who reads his palm and says he’ll die that year. The Needle’s Eye of the title is an old Dominican gate, part of the medieval defensive walls in Sandomierz. The narrow passage inspires the narrator to pursue a degree in medieval history and eventually become a historian. Unfolding in an eloquent and slow-moving monologue, the novel sustains an intimate mood even as the narrator muses on existential matters (“Life means stumbling after yourself without any hope that you’ll ever find yourself”). Fans of modernist fiction will find much to admire. (Nov.)