SOURCE: A review of Bohin Manor, in New York Times Book Review, July 15, 1990, Sec. 7, p. 7.

In the review below, Hampl traces the autobiographical and historical significance of the narrative design of Bohin Manor.

This beautiful, grave book [Bohin Manor] begins not once, but twice. It opens first, guilelessly, as a novel: "Miss Helena Konwicka rose that day right after dawn, as she usually did during the week."

On the next page it starts up again, this time in the voice of a memoir: "Miss Helena Konwicka, my grandmother, stopped in front of her window, and once again glanced at a dewdrop containing a likeness of the holiday morning's light."

From the moment Tadeusz Konwicki casually introduces his possessive pronoun—"my grandmother"—the ground shifts powerfully under the novel. Its pastoral assumptions are uprooted, and the book ceases to be simply a story. It turns into a lyric antiphon...