[DoroKickcrofe]

It is not easy to say what it is that awakens the inexpressible reveries and nostalgia that slowly rise within the soul like birds in flight: a fragment of a landscape, a single lighted window in a darkened house front, a glimmer on a distant shore, the smell of the earth, a heavy rain, or the murmur of the wind. Such thoughts seem to have their source in something concrete, yet they elude the tongue and never show themselves in full light; they slip through fingers too clumsy to catch and hold them. They seem to evoke the sensation of a continuous but vain approach to something unattainable - the very root of consciousness, overgrown with sterile and emotionless years - as if they sprang forth in those regions (near the dreams of delirium perhaps) where everything is somehow known but condemned to indistinct existence. And examined in detail they still do not reveal all of their secret nature, yet sometimes they can suddenly drive a man to an act that no one can understand.

Tremendous. Took this from the shelf at the used bookstore on a whim, because (sigh, I must admit to my fondness for them) there were jacket quotes "genius" and "one of the greatest European writers " (both from critic Peter Levi) and the price was right, and I had never heard of this Gustaw Herling, Polish resistance fighter, prisoner of the Soviet labour camps (which produced a book that some say is the masterpiece of that experience, A World Apart), and unpublished exile in Sicily. The three loosely connected tales here are all set in Italy, and I kept having to remember that they were not, in fact, written by an Italian, so vivid are they in their ability to conjure the country.

The first, the title story, evokes the community, the history, and the landscape of its isolated island in novella length, and slowly, in precise, controlled prose, its central tragedy and its repercussions. The third is a historical piece, in which the slow, agonizing physical decay of Pope Urban IV during the plague years prompts his hallucinations of the earlier torture and burning of a heretic in the town square. The standout for me, however brilliant the other two were, was the achingly beautiful and moving central piece, the story of a leper doomed to an existence of total isolation who is unable to stifle his desire for human contact. It's up there with the great short stories of world literature.

[Almolfuncomma]

I'm glad you've read and drawn our attention to this book of three novellas, Liehtzu. I mentioned Herling-Grudziński's name on the Russian literature thread in this forum as recently as 5th November, as an example of a foreign writer spending time in a Soviet labour camp. But I have never read "The Island", although I have a copy on my shelves (with the Saint Sebastian cover). The superlatives in the blurb were a little off-putting.

I first heard his name several years ago, but it was not one of the names of Polish authors that I had acquainted myself with earlier. I shall now put him on my TBR pile. I shall also look out for "A World Apart".