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The Island: Three Tales

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This collection of three long stories offers what no reader should expect to encounter in a book published in 1994: an old-fashioned work of literature. The author is a 74-year old Polish expatriate whose other book, "A World Apart," is his first-person account of his experiences in a Soviet slave labor camp. "The Island" is a book that could have been written only by a person who endured a living hell. Herling's characters are society's outcasts: a leper locked in a tower, a priest without a congregation, a Medieval blasphemer strung up in a cage. The stories depict the ability of people to survive with dignity in the most miserable circumstances. "The Island" enthralls with its storytelling and its view of the human condition, of the author's devotion to perseverance even when all is unutterably lost. You will feel yourself a wiser person when you finish reading this book.

After reading the three superlative novellas that make up this book, I can only wish that more of Gustaw Herling's work will soon be translated from the original Polish. He is a writer of rare and wonderful talents.

The three novellas that make up "The Island" are both beautiful and harrowing. They all take place in Italy, but in very different parts of Italy. The one unifying thread running through all three is that, despite life's pain, loneliness and despair, we endure. There is an unquenchable hope in almost all human beings and it lives on until we take our last breath.

The title novella, "The Island," is set on the beautiful Isle of Capri, just off the Italian coast near the village of Sorrento. "The Island" contains a "story within a story," and it is the inner story that is perhaps the more interesting of the two.

The "story within a story" in "The Island" takes place during the 17th century in a Carthusian monastery called "the Certosa." The monks have become the antithesis of all they profess to believe and, not wishing to lose either their riches or their good health, they bar their doors to all sufferers when plague ravages the island.

When the priests ministering to the suffering villagers die, however, four Carthusian monks decide to take their place and, in this way, atone for the sins of the monastery. For reasons I won't reveal (I don't want to spoil the story), they decide to travel across the island bearing the sculpture known as the Pieta dell'Isola. Suffice it to say that the images this conjures of Calvary are nothing short of stunning.

The plague ends, of course, and the monastery is eventually restored, but all is never as it had been. Something has been lost, but something quite beautiful has also been gained.

The story that enfolds the above is a love story of sorts that involves a mason and a young girl. At the center of this romance is a horrific accident that changes the course of their love. But is it an accident? Was it only chance that brought it about?

The denouement of this wonderful (and very moral) story is far too intricate to summarize in a quick review and it might spoil the ending for future readers as well. Let's just say that "The Island" is an unforgettable story of both beauty and pain and one that will change forever the way I look at Capri.

"The Second Coming" is a novella of point and counterpoint. It is the story of the agonized last years of the reign of Pope Urban IV, a man whose life has become so filled with suffering that he wishes for little more than to die, a feat he cannot seem to accomplish. It is also the story of the miracle of the Eucharist, however, this particular miracle is not accomplished in any way the reader will anticipate.

"The Second Coming" contains an ingenious plot twist that is reminiscent of the second coming of Christ. This is a medieval tale (13th century) that takes place in the town of Orvieto. Once you read the story, you will understand why I say that it is perfectly placed.

"The Tower" takes place in the hauntingly beautiful Val d' Aosta, a section of the Italian Alps just south of Switzerland, and a place filled with verdant valleys and glacial peaks. "The Tower" may very well be the best novella in the book and the most haunting.

"The Tower" is the first person narration of a Polish officer who comes to Aosta in the summer of 1945, intending to rest in the home of a friend after the Italian campaign.

The house had originally belonged to a retired teacher from Turin, a teacher who is now dead. On a table near a window, the Polish officer finds a volume of Xavier de Maistre, "Lepreux de la Cite d'Aoste," and on the wall he sees an engraving of a rectangular tower in Aosta where the leper in Maistre's books was confined. Interested, the Polish officer decides to investigate the leper's story and in so doing, he finds out much about the death of the teacher from Turin. This story, too, involves a tragedy and a large sculpture and, perhaps, a miracle.

All three of these novellas are haunting, beautiful, harrowing and, ultimately, compassionate. They all contain point and counterpoint, visions of both light and dark. These are not simple tales; they are multilayered and complex and convoluted, and it may take more than one reading to fully absorb them. I don't recommend reading all three at one sitting. Herling offers us far too much richness for that.

Herling's prose is both perfect and beautiful, in a spartan sort of way. We remain a little detached from the novellas, a little aloof, and that is probably good. There is so much emotion in these stories that a bit of detachment seems almost necessary.

These novellas are tales of extreme suffering, perhaps the most extreme suffering any human being can endure, yet all three manage to be heartbreakingly beautiful as well. Anyone who doesn't read this book is cheating himself; anyone who does, will come away forever changed.

Herling has written a really great boo