The Issa Valley: A Novel
Written by Czeslaw Milosz
Translated from the Polish by Louis Iribarne

Thomas, the child-protagonist of The Isa Valley, is subject to both the contradictions of nature in this severe northern setting and the sometimes enchanting, sometimes brutal timbre of village life. There are the deep pine and spruce forests, the grouse and the deer, and the hunter's gun. There is Magdalena, the beautiful mistress of the village priest, whose suicide unleashes her ghost to haunt the parish. There are also the loving grandparents with whom Thomas lives, who provide a balance to the not-quite-Dostoevskian devils that visit the villagers. In the end, Thomas is severed from his childhood and the Issa River, and leaves prepared for adventures beyond his valley. Poetic and richly imagined, The Issa Valley is a masterful work of fiction from one of our greatest poets.

"An idyll of immense charm and poetic depth. . . It takes a masterpiece to reveal the sheer unreality of our modern creative modes and poses, and Milosz's novel is such a masterpiece."
JOHN BAYLEY, The New York Review of Books

"A lyrical account of a rural boyhood, dominated by family, nature and village life... One is constantly aware of being in the hands of a master--of a talent that is original, unhurried, almost serene...He is a remarkable writer."
LARRY MCMURTRY, The Washington Star

CZESLAW MILOSZ was born in Szetejnie, Lithuania in 1911. A witness to the devastation of Lithuania and Poland by the Nazi and Stalinist tides, he survived World War II in German-occupied Warsaw with his wife, Janina, publishing in the underground press. After the war he was stationed as a cultural attache from Poland in New York, Washington, and Paris; he defected to France in 1951. In 1960 he accepted a position at the University of California at Berkeley. Milosz received the 1978 Neustadt International Prize in Literature and the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in Krakow, Poland, in 2004.

Publishing House: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2000
SoftCover book measuring 5.5" x 8.25"
288 pages
English Language Version

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