Bohn Manor (First Edition)

Shortly after accepting a marriage proposal from a gentry neighbor, Helena Konwick, a late-nineteenth-century Lithuanian, falls in love with a passionate and mysterious Jew

Against an ironically luxuriant late-19th-century atmosphere, Konwicki's disturbing parable fuses elements of old-fashioned romance, phantasmagoria and premonitory fable. The author/narrator portrays his Lithuanian Polish grandmother, Helena Konwicka, as a young woman torn between her fiance, a stuffy, conventional count, and a magnetic Jewish wanderer and political activist. Her anti-Semitic prejudices surface, but love wins out--or almost does. When Helena announces that she's pregnant, her graying father, who hasn't spoken a word since the failed Polish uprising of 1863, brings this somnambulistic drama to a jolting finale. Musically mixing memory and foreboding, Konwicki ( Moonrise, Moonset ) peoples his brooding landscape with two future despots: the young Hitler (here called Schicklgruber), and Stalin (here Police Chief Dzhugashvili, whose chief delight is arresting nationalists and liberals). Poet Alexander Pushkin, seeking a home among the Poles, and military hero Adam Mickiewicz also figure in the plot.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Miss Helena cannot choose between the Count with the checkered past and the red-haired Jew, both of whom ardently pursue her, even in her dreams. For a woman of her position in late-19th-century Lithuania, each option is full of social significance. So, this summer, as the storm clouds gather over the countryside, she searches Bohin Manor and the neighboring town for some sign, some way out of her dilemma. Her father is no help, having not spoken since the failed Polish uprising of 1863. And her mother, long dead, is simply a cross on a mysterious roadside grave. Even her parish priest has lost his faith. Only Tadeusz Konwicki, Helena's grandson, can resolve this tension. Poland's greatest contemporary writer uses fiction to rediscover his grandmother, lost in the swirl of time and politics. Konwicki's latest novel is finely crafted and offers timely insight into the current Lithuanian turmoil. Highly recommended.
- Paul E. Hutchison, Fisher mans Paradise, Bellefonte, Pa.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.