Brilliant work. How did the Nobel Committee manage to overlook Herling?
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
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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