From Publishers Weekly
Deeply pessimistic yet oddly invigorating, this diary covering 12 months of Milosz's life in 1987-1988 is a disarmingly candid self-portrait of the Nobel poet, novelist and essayist. Milosz, born in Lithuania in 1911, also recollects the German occupation of Poland during WW II, where he worked as a writer for resistance journals. He articulates his philosophical rejection of both communism and capitalism and voices doubts about his poetry, life's meaning and an afterlife. He mourns the death in 1986 of his wife of nearly 50 years and minutely dissects their relationship. Besides discussing numerous modern Polish poets and novelists, Milosz, professor of Slavic languages and literature at UC Berkeley, offers shrewd comments on an enormous range of writers, from Beckett to Balzac. This lively journal shows Milosz grappling with his thoughts on evil, death, sex, vanity, music and spirituality. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Memoirs from the Nobel prize-winning poet 30 years after Native Life.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
A twilight journal by Nobel Prize winner Milosz (Beginning with My Streets, 1992, etc.), very much concerned with fame, the aging body, his place in Polish literature, and general regrets for mysteries unsolved and unsolvable in the remaining time before death. Daily in 1987 and 1988, Milosz recorded a variety of thoughts and feelings on a wide range of topics: the burning pace of his renown (readings and papers delivered everywhere, a conference on Central Europe in the presence of the Polish Pope); the state of his Berkeley garden (deer keep eating the heliotrope); his health (occasionally poor, usually robust); his recently dead wife (nursed through Alzheimer's at the end, but earlier subject to a misdiagnosed brain tumor); his alienation from contemporary American poets (``American poetry equals an enormous collection of snapshots from which we divine the things observed and the mind of the observer. In his mind we may discover the conviction that `there is nothing to write about' ''); and his ruminations on the body and the soul. About Pope John Paul II Milosz is especially interesting, the Pope being an ex-poet himself. His countryman clearly fascinates Milosz, and scares him a little as well: A shadow of nationalistic messianism peeks from behind what Milosz otherwise approvingly sees as the Pope's moral rigidity. But it is Poland and its faults and strengths that Milosz pays most attention to in this journal. And in light of these, he seems to want to put things finally right with his countrymen vis-…-vis himself. Because some if not most of these references are to a time and place and people American readers are far less than familiar with, these sections may be heavy going, and Milosz is not always concisely intelligible. Still, this is an intimate portrait on the whole, more personal than Milosz's prose usually is--a generosity, finally. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Polish

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Like Native Realm, Czeslaw Milosz's autobiography written thirty years earlier, A Year of the Hunter is a "search for self-definition." A diary of one year in the Nobel laureate's life, 1987-88, it concerns itself as much with his experience of remembering - his youth in Wilno and the writers' groups of Warsaw and Paris; his life in Berkeley in the sixties; his time spent with poets and poetry - as with the actual events that shape his days. Throughout, Milosz tries to account for the discontinuity between the man he has become and the youth he remembers himself to have been. Shuttling between observations of the present and reconstructions of the past, he attempts to answer the unstated question: Given his poet's personality and his historical circumstances, has he managed to live his life decently?

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Deeply pessimistic yet oddly invigorating, this diary covering 12 months of Milosz's life in 1987-1988 is a disarmingly candid self-portrait of the Nobel poet, novelist and essayist. Milosz, born in Lithuania in 1911, also recollects the German occupation of Poland during WW II, where he worked as a writer for resistance journals. He articulates his philosophical rejection of both communism and capitalism and voices doubts about his poetry, life's meaning and an afterlife. He mourns the death in 1986 of his wife of nearly 50 years and minutely dissects their relationship. Besides discussing numerous modern Polish poets and novelists, Milosz, professor of Slavic languages and literature at UC Berkeley, offers shrewd comments on an enormous range of writers, from Beckett to Balzac. This lively journal shows Milosz grappling with his thoughts on evil, death, sex, vanity, music and spirituality. (Aug.)

Library Journal