Moonrise Moonset

Like Dostoyevsky's Underground Man, Konwicki churns out inspired ramblings, writing to spite a world winding down in selfishness and stupidity. As the Solidarity movement fizzles, he calls Poland, his native land, ""an enormous labor camp,'' its inhabitants ``the most seasoned slaves in all of Europe.'' His prose cuts like a knife through the sterility of Soviet domination on the one hand and the lethargy of his fellow Poles on the other. This diary shuttles back and forth between ``the daily, senseless free-for-all'' of 19801981, his adolescent years on the run from Nazi invaders and Lithuanian police, a literary junket to Stalinist Russia and childhood in Lithuania. The worm of uncertainty gnaws at Konwicki (A Minor Apocalypse, A Dreambook for Our Time. His voicecyncial, witty, self-deprecating, even nihilisticis uniquely his own, and its liberating potential lies in the way he pushes the reader to the edge of despair in order to confront the madness of our time. (August)