Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society
The Long Voyage (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
An autobiographical novel about a young Spaniard's deportation toward Buchenwald in a cattle truck. It is Jorge Semprún's first and most famous book.
Work Information
A book that turns the journey of deportation into literature through memory and witness.
The book does not just record wartime experience; it also asks how that memory is retold years later. Its restraint makes the experience feel even heavier.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Penguin Classics
- Published
- 1997-03-01
- Pages
- 240 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.11 x 1.17 x 18.24 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780141180298
- ISBN-10
- 0141180293
- Price
- 7619 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/History/Americas/United States
Gasping for breath in a cattle truck occupied by 119 other men, a young Spaniard captured fighting with the French Resistance counts off the days and nights as the train rolls slowly but inexorably toward Buchenwald. On the five seemingly endless days of the journey, he has conversations that send him into daydreams about his childhood or set him fighting Resistance battles over again. He describes the temporary holding prison where the names of distant concentration camps are spoken of in whispers - their individual horrors discussed, rated, contemplated. In chilling detail, the trip with those 119 men - some fearful, some defiant - is evoked, along with his own confusion, anger, and bitter resignation. When at last the fantastic, Wagnerian gates to Buchenwald come into sight, the young Spaniard is left alone to face the camp.
Jorge Semprun , novelist and playwright, was Spain?s Minister of Culture from 1988?1991. He lives in Paris.
Reviews
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The translation is an accurate rendition of the original text and I would recommend it to anyone not able to read the work ...
I am currently studying for an MA in translation and purchased this work in order to assess the translation against the original, which I'd already purchased elsewhere. The translation is an accurate rendition of the original text and I would recommend it to anyone not able to read the work in the source language (French)
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The long silence of the lambs
If members of your family have seen terrible things during any war, Vietnam or Iraq, you know that they do not talk about it. Not for ten or twenty years. It happened to Semprun after WWII: he did not talk about the camps until 1963, and even then, in this beautiful novel full or restraint, he does not talk about Buchenwald: he just describes the long voyage to the camp. It is horrible enough. Semprun is above all a great writer, with strong images and a good sense of composition. This book is about learning "to stay inside yourself",as he says, true to yourself. Semprun is not translated enough. He had an interesting career, as a young communist aristocrat, a resistant,a Minister of the Spanish government, but what is left for us is an incomparable writer.
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Five Stars
Stunning