Volcano and Miracle : a selection of fiction and nonfiction from The journal written at night /

Polish exile Herling, who lives in Naples, is a writer of fierce intelligence, wide culture, piercing irony and resistance to cant. This kaleidoscopic collage of reminiscences, literary commentary, reflections, parables and semi-fictionalized historical tales is drawn from his Journal Written at Night, which has been appearing since 1970 in the Polish émigré monthly Kultura. Hopping from travel notes on Venice, to the 1941 suicide of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, to a revolt in 1647 of Naples's common people against the Spanish viceroy, to the Katyn mass grave, where the bodies of 4500 Polish officers executed by Soviet troops were discovered in 1943, Herling muses on history's enormous crimes and portrays humanity as stumbling toward freedom despite ignorance, superstition and evil. Born in 1919, Herling, who organized an anti-Nazi underground group and spent two years in a Soviet slave-labor camp during WWII, recounts his meetings with Bertrand Russell, Ignazio Silone and Witold Gombrowicz and offers keen insights into dozens of writers ranging from Camus, Kafka, Conrad, Mann, Gogol and Gorky to Simone Weil and Martin Buber. (June) FYI: In June, Penguin will release in paperback Herling's A World Apart (first published in English in 1951), a chronicle of his ordeal in the Soviet camp. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Banned in Poland for nearly 40 years, the work of the important Polish author Herling is gradually becoming known in the West with the dissolution of communism: the novel A World Apart (1951; 1989), informed by his horrific term in a Soviet slave labor camp during World War II, was followed by The Island: Three Tales (LJ 12/92). The present title is a selection of reflections and critical essays from Herling's Journal Written at Night, a diary published over the course of several decades in the Polish émigré monthly, Kultura. The pieces begin in 1970 and extend to 1993; they are replete with dry-eyed requiems for fellow intellectuals (Ignazio Silone, Nicola Chiaromonte) and brilliant voices silenced by the Soviet state (Nadezhda Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Varlam Shalamov). Herling's fascination with historic cataclysm‘volcanic eruptions, plagues, miracles‘forms the journal's leitmotiv, familiar to readers of The Island. "Is it possible to live without hope?" he asks, echoing Dostoevsky in House of the Dead. Herling's wise, measured probing of man's worth in a "soulless world" carries a chilling resonance. For all literature collections.‘Amy Boaz, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A unique and wonderfully entertaining collection of reflections and fictions. Now in his 70s, Herling is known for stories published under the title The Island (1967) and for a much-acclaimed memoir of his two years in a Soviet labor camp, A World Apart (1986). The Polish writer, who lives in Naples, has been publishing brief pieces, elegant journal entries, in the Polish exile periodical Kultura for two and a half decades. The publication in English of this excellent selection of them is cause for celebration. Herling is a virtuoso of his chosen genre. His little pieces--most are only a page or two--are rich in a rare sort of intelligence that is specifically literary in two ways. First, his imagination is steeped in the European and American literary tradition. For Herling the bond between art and life is strong. His is a way of knowing the world that enables him, for example, to see how Joseph Conrad's fiction can be brought to bear--subtly, compellingly, effortlessly--on the problem of Italian terrorism in the 1970s. Second, thanks to Strom's fine translation, Herling's gift for prose comes through as forthright and unpretentious yet also elegant. Style and insight fuse seamlessly in these bright, hard gemstones, and in some sense style even becomes insight. His language reveals the hidden depths in otherwise ordinary experience. His topics range widely from literature and art to politics, history, and religion. What finally binds this disparate collection into a whole, though, is the uniformly intense quality of attention that he devotes to each of his subjects. A literary performance of the highest order by a writer too little known in this country.