Drawing from the author's own experience as a member of the French Resistance and his subsequent time in Buchenwald Concentration Camp, this is the story of one man's struggle to write a book created from the obsessions and images that repeatedly returned to him in a nightmarish way.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Jorge Semprun's riveting book Literature or Life has been 50 years in the making. Half essay, half memoir, the book details the hellish two years the author spent in a German concentration camp during World War II. The facts are simple: while still a teenager, Semprun joined the French Resistance. He was captured in 1943 and sent to Buchenwald. There he remained until the camp was liberated in April of 1945. Those two years shaped all the ones that have followed, as Semprun has struggled to express a living death, an "experience of Radical Evil."
Literature or Life is more than just a memoir of life in the camps and afterward. It is a meditation on the power of language to process experience. Through his novels, screenplays, and poetry, Semprun has revisited the central events of his life; now, so many years later, he looks back again, this time without the filter of fiction, to reexamine his life, his writing, and his memory of death.
Review
Mr. Semprun subsequently wrote many novels and screenplays . . . but only in 1987, when he heard that Primo Levi had committed suicide, did he finally begin this work of burrowing, towering insight. . . . [T]he book is metafiction in the largest, most generous sense. Profound human issues are at stake, and this memoir refuses to regurgitate the merely personal. In what turns out to be the fictional disjunction of its title, it generates literature and life from a convincing poetics of death. -- The New York Times Book Review, James McManus
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unique,
This review is from: Literature or Life (Paperback)
In this elegant piece of literary philosophy, Semprun treats readers to an extraordinarily rich remembrance of two years in Buchenwald. This work is shot through with memories of his life before, during and after the war and references to many of the thinkers and writers he has known. Passages as delicate as lace adorn chapters sound as bedrock. You could do much worse than to build a set of Holocaust readings on this foundation.One aspect making this an especially vibrant Holocaust testimony is that Semprun is not Jewish. While he approaches the subject of Jewish suffering with sympathy, gravity and deep respect, his reminiscences are framed by a lifetime of learning and an important non-Jewish perspective. Readers taste the suffering Semprun has experienced through continuing memories and glimpse what must have driven celebrated Jewish survivors like Paul Celan, Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski to suicide. Another laudable feature is Semprun's sure knowledge that in politics, as in everything, there is such a thing as paramount Evil, to which philosophers like Heidegger contributed. Deep thinking alone does not, according to his view, constitute righteousness. Semprun elegantly examines ends and means as well as thought processes, dramatically dismissing the moral relativism common among intellectuals these days. Despite the difficult subject matter, I found this work highly educational--and eminently hopeful and uplifting. Alyssa A. Lappen
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Intellectual catharsis,
This review is from: Literature or Life (Paperback)
Jorge Semprun was born in Spain and while studying philosophy in Paris, he was arrested. Accused of being member of the resistance, he was sent to Buchenwald where he spent 18 months before the camp was liberated. "Literature or Life" is his account of what it meant to survive Buchenwald, from the perspective of a highly intellectual mind. It represents a desperate search for understandiing the horrors of Evil, using philosophy and literature as reasoning tools, as well as psychological justification for survival. It is literature of the "living dead!"
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The story of a real human being,
By
This review is from: Literature or Life (Paperback)
Jorge Semprun spent two years in a concentration camp, Buchenwald. He was a known writer before and continued to be a writer afterwards. In this reflection on his life experience he reveals himself to be first of all a true human being , the Yiddish word is 'mensch' and it applies to him though he is not Jewish. Semprun's meditation on the meaning of his writing and the meaning of his life is a moving one, and a unique one. He is an original person with a way of thinking and understanding things of his own. Who reads this book will get to know a mind and a human being of unique distinction.
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