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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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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

- AWARDS
Mantel, Woodson on Women’s Prize Longlist

- SEEN & HEARD
Reese’s Book Club Reveals April Pick

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.