[The Issa Valley] is an idyll of immense charm and poetic depth, a story without much conventional plot about a boy growing up in the Lithuanian countryside and raised largely by grandparents proud of their Polish background….

The portraits in this novel will remind readers of those classic figures drawn from Tolstoy in Childhood and Boyhood, and by Aksakov in his family memoirs. But Milosz is more humane than Tolstoy and less "creamy" (in literary historian Prince Minsky's word) than Aksakov. The child of The Issa Valley accepts his elders with unconscious and uncomprehending love, but the pattern of their days and their being is created with a great poet's unobtrusively vivid power. As the book progresses we understand more and more of the nature and outlook of the hero's grandfather, who is at first a painting in words, like Ghirlandaio's Old Man. The hero's grandmothers are similarly...