The Noonday Cemetery and Other Stories - Softcover

Gustaw Herling; Bill Johnston

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081121639X ISBN 13: 9780811216395

Publisher: New Directions, 2006

Synopsis

Selected by The Los Angeles Times Book Review as one of the Ten Best Fiction Books of 2003.

The Noonday Cemetery & Other Stories, selected by Herling himself shortly before his death in 2000, is a collection of thirteen brilliant stories spanning the last twenty years of his life. His novel The Island was published to great acclaim in 1993, and his memoir, A World Apart, is among the most powerful accounts of life in the Soviet gulag. Volcano and Miracle, published in 1996, contains short fiction and prose writings from his Journal Written at Night. But nowhere before have Herling's best stories―and Herling was indeed a master of the short story―been compiled and published in English translation.

In "The Noonday Cemetery," an eerie graveyard on an Italian hillside overlooks the sea and hides the secrets of a murder (or suicide?). "Beata, Santa" describes the plight of a young Polish woman raped by Serbs, who is pressured by the Catholic Church to keep her child. In "A Madrigal of Mourning," a Russian woman musicologist becomes obsessed with Carlo Gesualdo (1560-1613), Prince of Venosa, a madrigalist and murderer.

These timeless stories, dealing with moral, often historical, subjects and written in passionate, deeply affecting prose, affirm without a doubt the assessment by The Boston Globe that Herling is "a writer of stylistic mastery and moral depth, who deserves to be placed among the best in any language."

About this title

About the Author:

Gustaw Herling was born in 1919 in Kielce, Poland. In 1940, he was captured by the Russians and spent two years in a Soviet labor camp. After WWII, he founded the Polish magazine Kulture, which virtually sustained Polish culture during Communist rule. He settled finally in Naples, where he died in 2000.

Bill Johnston is the leading translator of Polish literature in the United States. His translation of Tadeusz Rózewicz’s new poems won the 2008 Found in Translation Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Poetry Award.

From Publishers Weekly:

This, the late Polish author's (A World Apart, Volcano and Miracle) final work, is a collection of 13 disquieting short fictions set primarily in Italy, from the present to the ancient past. Elegantly translated by Bill Johnston, these tales are-in the words of one character-a "constant mediation on death...and the power of Evil." In the title story, a remote village is haunted by the decades-old mystery of an apparent murder-suicide by two unlikely lovers. Roman authorities are baffled by the regular spike in suicides that occurs every August 15 in "The Height of Summer." In "The Silver Coffer," an antique coffer contains the secret of a medieval monk's fratricide and supposed penance. An "atmosphere of mystery" pervades the collection, less of the supernatural than of the "mystery of every heart," which the author will not subject to what one character calls the "superficial observation" of "psychological analysis." Surfeited in literary allusion to 19th-century horror stories (notably the works of Poe and "The Turn of the Screw"), Herling's collection is more elegiac than macabre, a work of "mortal agony ending with a triumph over death."
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About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 081121639X
• ISBN 13: 9780811216395
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256