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THE NOONDAY CEMETERY

Name: THE NOONDAY CEMETERY
Author: Gustaw Herling
ISBN: 0-8112-1529-6

AND OTHER STORIES

by Gustaw Herling & translated by Bill Johnston ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 24, 2003

Brilliant work. How did the Nobel Committee manage to overlook Herling?

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A broad generational sweep and a strong sense of the artist’s identification with his creations distinguishes this striking collection of the late (1983–96) short fiction of an essential European writer.

Herling (1919–2000) was a heroic participant in WWII, survivor of a Soviet labor camp (an experience recorded in his famed 1986 memoir, A World Apart), and champion and preserver of his native Poland’s postwar literary culture. His tales, previously collected in The Island (published by World in 1966) and Volcano and Miracle (1996), are painstakingly shaped allegorical expressions of struggle, alienation, and the human will to persevere and endure. Here, an involved narrator who reveals both his sources of information and his own literary strategies appears in most of these 15 stories, several of which concern the Holocaust and similar 20th-century atrocities. The title piece, for example, turns on the unexplained burial of a Nazi soldier in an Italian cemetery. The virtual sanctification of a Polish woman who bears the “child of [her] rape” by Serbian soldiers brings harshly ironic consequences in “Beata, Santa”; and the manner in which grief can “infect” a survivor is rigorously analyzed in the story of a pair of war-ravaged English archeologists (“A Hot Breath From the Desert”). Numerous allusions to classic literature, art, and music enrich the textures of stories that reach throughout history and myth, including meditations on the lifelong ordeals of an eminent surgeon obsessed with the Neapolitan legend of the “evil eye” (“Don Ildebrando”), a conflicted London hangman (“Notebook of William Moulding, Pensioner”), and the thief released by Pontius Pilate in place of the crucified Christ (“The Eyetooth of Barabbas”). Even more indicative of Herling’s versatility are the revelation of a moribund priest’s recognition of evil in his world and in himself (“The Exorcist’s Brief Confession”), and the unforgettable account of a deaf woman’s paradoxically liberating withdrawal from reality (“Ashes”).

Brilliant work. How did the Nobel Committee manage to overlook Herling?

Pub Date: June 24, 2003

ISBN: 0-8112-1529-6

Page Count: 256

Publisher: New Directions

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.