'It’s Spring, 1870. The kindly Polish baker and widower, Ignacy Wadowski, cannot get his new young wife Jadwiga to make love with him. Ignacy asks a friendly Jewish healer who lives in the forest, for something to make him more attractive, but unexpectedly gets a potion that, while its effect lasts, makes him young again. Now courting Jadwiga as the youthful stranger Adalbert, Ignacy wins her love. The key moral dilemma is, while Ignacy is now enjoying his lawful wife, she’s enjoying a man she thinks isn’t her husband. Can one of them sin and the other not? The scheme begins to unravel when village gossip arises with sympathy for Ignacy - who’s being cuckolded by himself. The novel becomes an allegory, not just of all marriage and its difficulties, but of the expansion of consciousness available to a humble man, taking him into unsuspected realms of history, literature, national destiny and moral confrontation.' (Publication summary)
Dedication: To the memory of Aleksander Fredro, author of Husband and Wife, who made Poles laugh when there was not a lot to laugh about.
Epigraph: O mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In plants, herbs, stones and their true qualities.
-Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
'Twenty-one years have passed since John Stephenson’s first novel, The Optimist. His long-overdue sophomore book comes in the unusual form of a Polish fable, The Baker’s Alchemy. Those expecting anything similar to his well-received chronicle of poet Christopher Brennan might at first be scratching their heads in puzzlement, but Stephenson possesses style and humour in spades, qualities that have fallen out of fashion in Oz lit.' (Introduction)
'Twenty-one years have passed since John Stephenson’s first novel, The Optimist. His long-overdue sophomore book comes in the unusual form of a Polish fable, The Baker’s Alchemy. Those expecting anything similar to his well-received chronicle of poet Christopher Brennan might at first be scratching their heads in puzzlement, but Stephenson possesses style and humour in spades, qualities that have fallen out of fashion in Oz lit.' (Introduction)
