Teodor Parnicki is regarded in Poland as one of the country's most original and important twentieth-century novelists, but he is virtually unknown in the West, and none of his books have been translated into English, French, or German. His genre is conventionally described as the historical novel, but this designation is not wholly adequate because of the elements of science fiction and fantasy in his works--especially the later ones. His writing has affinities with that of Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov, but without the elegant brevity of the first or the dazzling brilliance of the second. His early novels impart a feeling of the complexity and ambiguity of history and of existence in general; his later works embody a nearly solipsistic vision of the world as a reflection of the consciousness of the author, in which his personal experiences, reconstructions of historical events, and reminiscences of other...