Władysław Stanisław ReymontBesprekingen

Josio trabaja como vendedor de billetes en una estación de tren de provincias y, como de costumbre, permanece ante la ventanilla absorto en esta labor monótona y cotidiana: escucha las demandas, alcanza los billetes desde un estrecho compartimento, los sella, los entrega, recoge el dinero y devuelve el cambio. Y lo hace rápida y aplomadamente, con una gran parquedad de movimientos, como un autómata, mientras, ahogado por el traqueteo de los trenes, consigue olvidarse paulatinamente de sí mismo y construye castillos en el aire. Su principal sueño: viajar, tiene que viajar. No siempre ha sido vendedor de billetes.

At the turn of the century, Lodz, Poland was a quick-paced manufacturing center for textiles, replete with cutthroat industrialists and unsafe working conditions. Three young friends, a Pole, a Jew and a German, pool their money together to build a factory. The movie follows their ruthless pursuit of fortune. (fonte: Imdb)

This starts off REALLY STRONGLY. As I finished ch 1, I thought I'd found a new classic author and must get more of his works. That impression doesnt last.
Janina is the educated daughter of an irrascible widower. When he demands she marry (a rather engaging suitor) she refuses and leaves to become an actress.
But now it all started to become terribly dull. The ensuing chapters are largely inconsequential dialogue among the shallow and irrelevant acting folk she takes up with....the director and his faded, jealous wife...the tarts and the procuresses, the strapped for cash and the men looking for a bit of fun...
I dont often abandon a novel just 100 pages from the end...but couldnt face another word. This was a Nobel prize winning author, incidentally!

Yllättävänkin koukuttava kirja. Hetken jo pelkäsin että henkilöt kehittyisivät sellaiseen typerään sankarimuottiin, mutta onneksi loppuun asti pysyttiin maan tasalla. Aivan loistava kirja, unohdettu helmi.

Oikein mielenkiintoinen ja helppolukuinen talonpoikaisromaani. Tätä on helppo verrata esim. Gösta Berlingin saagaan, Väinö Linnaan yms. vastaaviin. Romaanissa olivat osat syksy ja talvi, ja aloitin osan 2 aidosti uteliaana siitä mitä sieltä on tulossa.

Alla fine del XIX secolo, la città di Łódź è diventata il centro tessile più importante d'Europa. La società polacca ne è profondamente sconvolta.

Actually quite an enjoyable read. Makes me want to learn a bit more about Polish traditions around marriage and family. I also now need to read the other three books in this cycle.

Reymont is great if you like long, detailed and imaginative descriptions of people and places, and he is also excellent at character development. This book has a surprise ending and is well worth reading.

Truly the climax of the four books. This book, of the four, reminded me most of Tolstoy's style of writing. Truly a masterpiece, and shows the ambiguity of right and wrong as viewed from various perspectives. Punishment and guilt are so often unfairly meted out.

After the first short novel of the book I was concerned a bit if the whole book was like that. But fortunately that`s not the case. Great social critic short stories, some of them deeply moving and tragic.

Et toujours les cloches appelaient les égarés ; elles appelaient comme des mères en détresse, de la voix profonde de l’inquiétude ; tout le rivage résonnait d’un sanglot de bronze comme si la terre entière eût douloureusement supplié l’océan d’être pitoyable. (p. 7).

Une petite nouvelle découverte par hasard au détour d’un furetage dans une bibliothèque virtuelle. Un auteur polonais, Nobel de surcroît (et dont je n’avais jamais entendu le nom avant de le lire ce jour-là), qui écrit sur la Bretagne, j’ai cédé à la curiosité de cette drôle de combinaison.
Tout cela pour un résultat finalement moyen. Il y a certes quelques jolies phrases, mais rien qui ne dépasse une narration ordinaire, et je n’ai pas su partager l’angoisse de l’attente qui se prolonge, l’alternance de la peur et de l’espoir, les prières et les imprécations.
Ce premier contact m’a cependant donné envie de connaître mieux cet auteur et, peut-être, si je peux mettre la main sur ce livre, lire Les Paysans, qui semble son œuvre majeure.

The Peasants is the novel that won Polish author Ladislas Reymont the Nobel Prize in 1924. It was published in four volumes, in total over 1000 pages. Each volume is named for a season: Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer. It takes place over 10 months in a Polish peasant village, a real place that Reymont had once lived. It has been described by Martin Seymour-Smith as the greatest peasant novel ever written, the most authentic. He accomplished what Emile Zola tried but failed in The Earth, to re-create an entire farming village with a large cast of characters. In fact the plot of The Peasants slightly resembles Zola, but Reymont is clearly the superior because his people are more real, less grotesque, if not a little more boring, naturally.

I really did get the feeling of what it was like to be a peasant who has little experience of the "outside" world. To know a few things really well, like how to harvest cabbage, as if born with the skill; to be not so much an individual but a part of a whole village where privacy is limited and life's main events, like marriage, happen outside ones control. Small violence's and graces make up the day, dirt and mud is all encompassing, food the almighty task master and currency.

Unfortunately for Reymont and his obvious masterpiece, no one has bothered to publish a modern translation since it first came out in English in 1925. It was never re-published in any quantity, and so its only available in expensive rare editions, the first volume alone cost me $25. The translation is somewhat stilted and out of date, the brittle pages leak fumes and are darkly colored. While I enjoyed it somewhat, I can't justify spending another $75 to read the remainder under these conditions. I sent a note to the New York Review of Books to look into it as possible re-print. An obvious literary injustice, and a Nobel winning novel at that.

Since I totally agree what Wikipaedia says about this book - after reading it - I thought I'll just copy the corresponding part here.
"Promised land (Ziemia Obiecana - in Polish) has been translated into at least 15 languages and two film adaptations—one in 1927, and one in 1975, directed by Andrzej Wajda. Reymont's best-known novel, is a social panorama of the city of Łódź during the industrial revolution, full of drastic detail, presented as an arena of the struggle for survival. In the novel, the city destroys those who accept the rules of the "rat race", as well as those who do not. The moral gangrene affects equally the three main characters, a German, a Jew, and a Pole. This dark vision of cynicism, illustrating the bestial qualities of men and the law of the jungle, where ethics, noble ideas and holy feelings turn against those who believe in them, are, as the author intended, at the same time a denunciation of industrialisation and urbanisation."
"In November 1924 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature over rivals Thomas Mann, Maxim Gorky and Thomas Hardy." for his other book "Peasants" or Chłopi.½

$439Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. No Jacket. 1st Edition. Complete in Four volumes: Vol. 4 is Second printing. Vol. 1,2,3 = First printing. New York, Alfred A. Knopf: