Customer Reviews

Literature or Life

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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

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!"

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.

"Literature or life" belongs to the autobiographical novels of Jorge Semprun, one of the most interesting French authors (of Spanish origin). The starting point of this book is the suicide of Italian author Primo Levi, who wrote on life as a prisoner in a Nazi-camp. Semprun had also been prisoner ( in Buchenwald) and thel question he faced in 1945 (and whihc he deals with in this book) was: shall I write about this traumatic experience immediately (like Primo Levi did) and so continue to confront myself with it (with all the psychological dangers) or shall I rather start living : act and try to forget the past for the time being. He decided on doing the latter. Only in the early sixties did Semprun write his first novel on the subject. Therefor this book forms a kind of trilogy together with "Le grand voyage" and "Quel beau dimanche". Once one starts reading Sempruns books, one gets carried away because this life is so interesting and he has relevant things to say about life, society and politics from the 40's till now.

Literature or Life by Jorge Semprun

This is a great book. Like Semprun's previous book on World War II, "What a Beautiful Sunday," this one uses his experience in Nazi concentration camps to tell a quite remarkable story (and stories within stories within stories), but also as a jumping-off place for wide-ranging musing about life, and art, and the dependency of each on the other (hence the apt title).

The book circles around the liberation of Buchenwald and the first few weeks afterwards, with extended forays into his experiences there, previous experiences with the French underground as a student at the Sorbonne, and with a lot of discussion of writers and philosophers along the way.

He starts by addressing the question of whether an experience like being in Buchenwald can be truly and fully addressed in literature - he says yes, certainly, given enough skill and commitment by the writer. Finding readers who are capable of comprehending and believing what is written is the problem. I think we have a good writer/reader match here, because I find Semprun to be startling in his clarity, illuminating, riveting and very funny from time to time (a sense of humor and absurdity that obviously served him well, and those that leaned on him for support well, too).

There is a bizarrely funny scene at the opening of the book, for example, when three British soldiers, brand new to the scene in Buchenwald walked up to him, and he was so happy to see them ("I felt more like laughing, gamboling in the woods, running from tree to tree") that he tried to engage them in what was, for him, normal conversation ("Say, I bet you fellas are noticing how quiet it is here - it's the birds! The smell of the crematory has driven them off, so the usual racket you hear in the forest just ain't happening here!") - Meanwhile these soldiers are staring at him in open-mouthed horror, as if he was a talking corpse, some kind of zombie... It takes Semprun a few minutes to figure out what the problem is here, and he decides, on reflection, that their perception is correct - that he and his comrades, the survivors, are a sort of zombie, that they hadn't really avoided death - that death and what he calls "radical evil" were so pervasive in the camp that nobody there survived in the usual sense - and he said that for the rest of his life, much of it as a younger man spent continuing to put himself in danger as a revolutionary fighter of various kinds, he felt an odd sort of invulnerability - an assumption that he would not be killed or even caught because he'd already been there, and somehow been given a pass to return to finish his business here.

One of his extended side trips is a discussion of Heidegger, of whom he says, in part, "Of course, there was a certain fascination - sometimes mixed with irritation - with the philosopher's language. With that abounding obtuseness through which one has to hack one's way, cutting clearings without ever reaching a definitive clarity. A never-ending labor of intellectual decipherment that becomes absorbing through its very incompletion."

It seems clear to me that Semprun used his experience with Heidegger partially as a guide in his own development as a thinker and writer, because, again - he writes with exceptional clarity, and no matter how far afield his musings range, he never loses the thread or the point of a remarkable and essential story in the process.

Jorge Semprún is one of the many survivors of the Holocaust who has left his memoirs written to the later generations. But what makes him different is the fact that he did not wrote just what he saw or lived: he wanted us readers to know the feelings, the thoughts and the worries that accompanied and still accompany a Buchenwald prisoner as well. Their words are not hateful to the Germans, nor show pity or regret towards the writer himself or his former fellows. Semprún does not analyze tha causes or the consecuences of his experience, he seems more to go through them once again, but from a diferent point of view: that of the free men. From there, he tries to explain things; not in a very reasonable or settled order, but simply as they come to his mind. The structure of the book reminds that of our own memories: fragmented, realistic, or perhaps a little more distant as time goes by; uncomplete. That lack of organisation makes the book even more sincere and pure, while still keeping a beautiful prose to tell the most amazing horrors.
A must for anyone who is interested in the Holocaust and its survivors, who are fading silently as time goes on.

Semprun died a few months ago, and the obituaries I saw had only good words for his life and work. I've also read a bit about the Nazi camps and very much admired and enjoyed the work of two Italian survivors, Primo Levi and Mario Rigoni Stern. So I was favorably disposed to this book. But how I disliked it!

What happened? Well, first off, the book does not detail the "hellish two years the author spent in Buchenwald," as the Amazon editorial review above states; these two years are constantly looming in the background, to be sure, but most of the book dwells on the period from the American liberation of Buchenwald onward, focusing perhaps most of all on the first few months of Semprun's return to Paris. Still, this focus wouldn't have bothered me in the slightest had Semprun not also irritated me, had his semi-poetic, self-absorbed style not struck me as the tactics of a man who is trying to pull the wool over his readers' eyes. In short, I don't really trust prose writers who try to write like poets. Several of his phrases--for instance, "Krematorium, ausmachen!"--recur, like poetic refrains, again and again, but, for me, the effect of these recurrences was not nearly as powerful as that of Primo Levi's single mention, in the tremendous last pages of the otherwise cheerful book _La tregua_ (which, I was gratified to see, Semprun also admires, so much so that he cribs from them, in fact), of the dawn order at Auschwitz: "Wstawac."

The book struck me as much too elliptical, too. Where did Semprun live when he returned from Buchenwald? What happened to his parents? Did he have a job? None of these questions is answered.

And then _Literature or Life_ is entirely humorless. It's not witty or ironic in the slightest. Now I don't really expect books about the camps to be comedies, but not even in his darkest books do the wit and ironic temperament of, say, a Primo Levi fail to shine through. Rigoni Stern, the other Italian writer I mentioned, isn't witty or ironic, but in his case the absence of these virtues is offset by two other virtues--selflessness and simplicity--that I prize in books very nearly as much as I do wit and irony.

I had the impression as well that Semprun was a man who regarded himself very highly. He lets you know, for no good reason, that he was a member of the first team of a well known French basketball club. By his own account, beautiful, young, and rich women were always throwing themselves into his arms. Perhaps they were, but the gentlemanly thing, it seems to me, is not to crow about it (if for no reason other than to spare the feelings of those of his readers into whose arms such women are not constantly throwing themselves!). His books, he reminds you, win prizes.

I must admit that I scoffed a bit when, in a book by Jean Améry, who was likewise held for a time at Buchenwald before being transferred to harder camps farther east, I first read that intellectuals suffered more than anyone else in the camps because, in addition to the physical hardships suffered by everyone, they suffered from a kind of moral loneliness in the camps, the result of their being cut off from intellectual activity, from a part of their being. For Semprun, on the other hand, Buchenwald seems to be a branch campus of the Sorbonne. He and his fellow prisoners are always discussing poets and philosophers. The philosophical discussions are always tedious and often embarrassing. At one point, after the liberation of the camp, Semprun discusses Heidegger and tours Goethe's Weimar haunts with one Lieutenant Walter Rosenfeld, a Jewish German-American in Patton's army. I had the distinct impression (perhaps mistaken) that this lieutenant was an invention. On the whole, then, Semprun's evocation of his intellectual activities at Buchenwald merely instilled in me a newfound respect for Améry's arguments. Améry, it suddenly seemed to me, was right, and for this realization, if for nothing else, I am grateful to _Literature or Life_.

The book came quickly and was in great shape. It was a hard cover and was packaged really well so that the corners didn't get bent even in my tiny mailbox.

The reviewers seem to disagree with Semprun and his original publisher as to which of his books are fiction. Gallimard lists "Le grand voyage" as a novel and "L'écriture ou la vie" as a "récit", which means it could very well be non-fiction, as indeed the work internally purports to be.