The Issa Valley:

...His novel The Issa Valley (1955), which has now been translated into English, is an attempt to recreate his Lithuanian boyhood and to capture the unique atmosphere of that region with its amalgam of nationalities, traditions, customs, and beliefs...

...Assuming the role of an omniscient narrator, however, Milosz repeatedly allows himself room for commentaries and insights acquired at a later stage of his life...

...THE ISSA VALLEY Books: BOYHOOD'S SOMBER BLESSEDNESS CZESLAW MILOSZ, the Berkeley profes-sor and 1980 Nobel Prize Winner in Literature, writes in Polish and considers himself primarily a Polish emigre poet...

...Pomposity, snobbery, and duplicity are subtly ridiculed...

...Cumulatively, however, these vignettes coalesce to create a sense of the locale and reflect Czeslaw Milosz Translated by Louis Iribarne Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $13.95,288 pp...

...Narrow-mindedness and blind adherence to ideals and causes is scoffed at, although again in a rather clever and delicate manner...

...Throughout the book Lithuania is viewed with affection, yet without saccharine, sentimental nostalgia...

...He is sensitive to the ambivalent tone of the novel, to the slang expressions and regional deviations from standard Polish in the original, and he reflects these very ably in his translation...

...He is even more acutely aware of the dichotomy and ambivalence in one's interaction with nature: with nature's giving and taking...

...Milosz's hero, though young and fascinated by the surrounding reality, becomes also familiar with the snobberies of nationality, language, and social status...

...The novel belongs to Polish literature...

...It is certainly unimportant for Milosz himself, who gives evidence, even in this very novel, of exceptional freedom from bo'ndage to nationalism and a keen awareness of the absurdities and potential for harm which too much attention to questions of language and nationality can provoke...

...This poetic novel is an attempt to come to grips - retrospectively - with the totality of Milosz's feelings and perceptions as a young boy...

...It is replete with detailed descriptions of seasons, places, hunts, and the young hero's sensual response to them...

...On the other hand, however, the novel reflects many more somber preoccupations...

...In many passages it approximates nineteenth-century realistic novels (e.g., in the descriptions of nature and subtle renditions of sexual awakening), yet there is simultaneously a disturbing, roguish quality about it...

...Regina Grol-Prokopczyk not only the growing pangs of its young hero, Thomas Surkont, but also the Lithuanian way of life in the early twentieth century, and the entire nexus of issues which has preoccupied Milosz during his childhood and afterwards...

...Milosz's elusive goal, as he put it in the latter work, has been: "to convey my entire bewilderment at 'being here' in one unachievable sentence, in which would simultaneously appear the granularity and smell of my Skin, the entire contents of my memory, and all of my current agreements and disagreements.'' The writing of The Issa Valley has certainly been informed by a similar impulse...

...Iribarne is particularly successful in his rendition of the various folk songs adduced in the novel...

...Indeed, through references to spirits, demons, the devil, the pagan gods, and a variety of local superstitions the supernatural is given a concrete reality in the novel...

...However, from a certain point of view, this is ultimately unimportant...

...Originally, however, he hails from Lithuania, a region which he himself refers to as "those foggy expanses that books, even textbooks, rarely provide information about (or, if they do, provide false...

...On the pne hand it is a nostalgic foray into the past and an attempt to salvage that blessedness and coritentment that Milosz's Lithuanian boyhood afforded...

...It is replete with anguished souls (Balthazar, Grandmother Dilbin), with references to human failure, divisions, and existential dilemmas...

...This overlapping of mature and childish reflections and the duality of perception account, partially at least, for the ambivalent tone of the novel...

...The Issa Valley is a unique book...

...The autobiographical character of the novel can easily be ascertained by comparing the experiences and passions of Thomas Surkont (the botanical and zoological bent, for instance) with those which Milosz openly admits to on the pages of his other books, like The Native Realm or his Visions at the San Francisco Bay...

...The central character of the book is thirteen years old when the novel ends, and many of his emotions and discoveries are those of a youngster...

...There is a duality of vision throughout this thinly-veiled autobiographical work...

...Louis Iribarne's translation is very competent...

...The Issa Valley is essentially a Bil-dungsroman set in the heavy atmosphere of the Lithuanian countryside and structured as a series of vignettes strung together in no particular order...

...In some respects it conforms to traditional belletristic conventions...

...It is also unimportant for Milosz's foreign readers, for despite his strong identification with Lithuanian land and people, his book reflects a broader vision and deals with metaphysical issues and theological considerations of general interest...

...But it also contains marvelous passages of lyrical contemplation, reflections on metaphysical issues (duality of body and mind, for instance), and expressions of fear of the supernatural...

...Thomas Venclova, a dissident Lithuanian writer (who has recently settled in the United States) and an authority on Lithuanian literature, not without regret claims that "this novel belongs to a certain conceivable, ideal Lithuanian literature: We have these types and motifs, there are these landscapes and seasons" - he continues - "but alas, we have no novel in which everything could be united into such an integral and beautiful entity...

...with one's belonging to it and yet not belonging...

...Thus - through selective illustration - we are offered an account of the physical, emotional, and intellectual evolution of the young hero during the actual time framework of the novel, but there are also anticipations, references to the past (e.g., accounts of the grandmother's youth), and even remote past (for example, the references to his sixteenth century relative enmeshed in anti-Trinitarian disputes...