Customer Reviews

The Faithful River (European Classics)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am fascinated by war novels. ("All Quiet on the Western Front" is one of my favorites.) And this book was very good. I've just finished reading it once through, and I immediately went back to read it a second time. When I first got it, I opened it up, read the first paragraph, and then stopped to say "Wow." There have been many (translated) foreign novels that I've read that are somewhat halting and broken as far as the language is concerned. ("All Quiet on the Western Front" included.) That was not the case with this novel. It was very fluid and smooth . . . very much like the river of the title. I originally checked this book out from a library, and liked it so much that I've come online to try and purchase it. I hope you like it as much as I did.

After completing my reading of the Faithful River by Zeromski I am reminded of "The English Patient", the movie starring Ralph Fiennes from several years back. Zeromski does a magnificant job of setting the ambience for this work and the reader is transported into the mind of the Soldier as he struggles to live. This book is exremely well transalated by Bill Johnston and is a pleasure for any one to read.

This novel is not just about love and passion and strength and bla bla bla, but about the socioeconomic classes and separations that existed in Poland under Ruski occupation, and overall dominated central and eastern Europe - we have the struggle between the idealist and the realist - and the aristocratic conditions its under- same conditions that eventually lead into the Great War - not necessary from any Russian influence but from the socioeconomic separations between the peasants and liberal Bourgeois - two extreme ends with virtually nothing in-between. The book has a tragic ending filled with "hope", a young girl refuses a pay off for her "poverty" from the same upper class that abandons her just after she got done protecting them. At the end a pesant cook says "they did you a bad turn, i can see - they hurt you good and proper - they did you wrong good and proper.", to the girl. The man who's life she saved fell in love with her, the man was a Duke, she was a peasant. He would marry her, bla bla bla, but at the end she was left ALONE with nothing but her dignity, abandoned after having risked so much. This book is thin and will probably take one or two reads to finish, nonetheless it weaves a strong clear message into the story. This book has almost nothing to do with 1836 historically, the whole story takes place in a manor house, and the uprisings are just a device to facilitate the message. It rather focuses on general attitudes held across western Europe moving into the late 19th early 20th century that eventually also lead to chaos in the East. This book is good and should be considered a Eastern European classic. Zeromski creates a flow that is exceptionally simple and rather tricky to correctly understand since the literate insensitive person does not catch the message and typically confuses this book for something else.

Stefan Zeromski was admired by Joseph Conrad, his contemporary and fellow countryman. Conrad had excellent taste.

The Faithful River is about people caught up in an unwinnable uprising of the Poles against the Russians in the 1860s. As one character tells us, the Poles are caught between the two grindstones of the Germans and the Russians, and either they submit to being ground to powder, or they resist. The modern Polish identity was made that way, in the Warsaw Uprising.

The novel starts with a young soldier, left for dead, struggling his way up through the bodies in a mass grave. It ends with another resurrection of sorts: a young woman, despairing to the point of death, being fetched out of the mud by a good and faithful servant. Chapter 10 is one of the most beautiful and most psychologically truthful portrayals of love that I have ever read, and what leads up to and away from that chapter is just as poetic and just as true.

Wonderfully written novel that describes polish life, polish heritage and polish pride. Places you in Poland witnessing loss, honor and love.

The setting for THE FAITHFUL RIVER is rural Poland in the first half of 1863, near Kielce, during the uprising against the Russians who at the time ruled over the south-eastern area of partitioned Poland. It was a bloody insurrection and it was brutally suppressed. The novel begins with a badly wounded insurgent, Jozef Odrowaz, stirring to consciousness amidst a pile of corpses after a battle. He manages to make it to a country manor, where a young woman, Salomea Brynicka, nurses him back to health. Over the course of the novel, the manor is visited by Russian troops, other Polish insurgents, and Odrowaz's mother (a duchess). THE FAITHFUL RIVER is both a war story and a love story. It also is a novel about the ravages of war on the civilian population, about nationalistic or patriotic fanaticism, and about class divisions.

According to the Translator's Introduction, Stefan Zeromski (1864-1925) was the leading Polish novelist of his generation. He was admired by, among others, Joseph Conrad, and he was considered for the Nobel Prize in 1924. THE FAITHFUL RIVER is "one of his greatest achievements and at the same time one of his most accessible works."

Nonetheless, the novel does not wear particularly well. To me, although it was written in 1912, it is very much a 19th Century novel. (Indeed, works I recently read by Nikolai Gogol and Ivan Turgenev, although written more than a half century earlier, are more modern than THE FAITHFUL RIVER.) The writing tends to be melodramatic or clichéd. (Example: "As he lay on the ground they hacked his belly and his legs until every last drop of blood had been spilled. It flowed from his veins, soaked into the meadow, and was drunk by the soft, thirsty spring earth.") The pace is on the slow side. There are frequent instances of the Gothic and of the supernatural.

I wish I could be more enthusiastic about what is (or once was) a classic of Polish literature, but the most I can muster for THE FAITHFUL RIVER is three stars. If I were Polish, however, I might well regard it more highly.

Fast shipping ansjust paid media mail, absolutely great thank you! Book in excellent condition.