The Unquestioned Answers

When Wisława Szymborska reviewed the Three Tenors

As I wrote last week, before news of the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal broke in January 1998, The Private Lives of the Three Tenors (published in December 1996) received very little press attention. This lukewarm reception came in spite of a healthy amount of coverage of the Three Tenors themselves at this time. Still, one of the few reviews that survive of Marcia Lewis’s The Private Lives of the Three Tenors carries an unlikely byline: poet and Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska.

Quite possibly the greatest photo of Wisława Szymborska, taken at her Nobel Prize banquet.

Szymborska’s review, titled “The Nut and the Gilded Shell,” ran with the book’s translation into Polish in 1999 under Szymborska’s long-running column in Poland, “Nonrequired Reading,” which in turn was dedicated to not the books that accumulated accolades and newsprint, but those that were popular hits despite literary laurels. This is how Lewis’s book merited its own Szymborska review. “Even the worst book can give us some…