Moonrise, Moonset

Konwicki's Moonrise, Moonset is a 'life-novel - part memoirs, part journal, part historic sketches and speculations...

The historic canvas is broad. The actual chronology of the book spans the months between the two winters of '81 and '82, from the early days of Solidarity and its struggles to survive to Konwicki's arrest as a dissident. But in between Konwicki harks back obsessively to his pastoral Lithuanian childhood, his underground activities during the Second World War, and to his experiences as a writer and film-maker involving the most distinguished Polish writers, directors and actors of recent time - Milosz, Wajda, Cybulski.

Konwicki switches incessantly between moods of nostalgia and blackest humour, musing on the irony of his situation as an artist: once a respected Establishment figure, he is now a political renegade, tolerated but unpublished in his own country, silenced for the unacceptable bleakness of his vision - for Konwicki 'reality' is more appalling than even he could have foreseen.

'Moonrise, Moonset... has to be considered Konwicki's best book.' New York Times Illustration by Jacques Richez