Customer Reviews

The Long Voyage (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

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Jorge Semprun was born in Spain but has lived most of his life in France. At a young age he joined the communist party and while active at the French resistance was captured by the Nazis. "The Long Voyage" is an autobiographical narrative, concentrating on the author's experience while being transported in a train to Buchenwald. Contrary to most Holocaust literature, this book is not a compilation of horrors and atrocities, but a stream-of consciousness description of a journey to the unknown, when time has ceased to exist, when "past," "present," and "future" all have lost meaning. This is what makes Semprun's narrative so interesting. It is not the logical sequence of events that dictates the narrative, but the mind's attempt to understand and, at the same time, escape reality.

This is a wonderful and moving novel about a French Resistance fighter of Spanish origin who is captured by the Nazis and sent to Buchenwald. It is brilliantly written, and I would recommend it to anyone intested in good writing, the Holocaust or the human spirit.

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.

Jorge Semprun has lived the novel he writes. He was in the French Resistance, captured, and deported to Buchenwald, where he spent two years. He was 21 years old when he was liberated. Yet, Semprun choses to write this, his first novel, as fiction. He uses as the structure of the book, his five-day train ride to the concentration camp in the winter of 1943. Within this basic frame, Semprun reflects on the decisions that led him to being in that cattle car with 99 other men, the nature of freedom and captivity, and his life back on the outside post-liberation. The unique method of organization, with flashbacks and forwards, provides depth to the story and mimics the way our minds travel, when our bodies can not.

This is a non-stop narrative, just one chapter, no breaks. Semprun never learned the name of his companion on the box-car ride, so he simply calls him "the guy from Semur." Sadly, the guy never got out of the box car. Semprun survived the box car and spent more than two years in Buchenwald, which he hardly describes.
But Semprun achieves literary stardom in his depiction of the S.S. murder of 15 Jewish children who somehow survived the voyage of horror -- without food or drink.
There is just one flaw. The gate of Buchenwald did not say "Arbeit macht frei!" It quoted Shakespeare: "To Each His Own." ("Jedem das Seine.")

I read this book because I was, and still am, interested in what happened during the Holocaust. I was hoping that I would find a lot of new and interesting things in this book, but I was disappointed. The book focuses on the tiresome journey to the camp, instead of what happens at the camp. The plot is also panoramic, and not episodic, so it is hard to understand which happens first, later, or at the present. The author uses really long sentences that is hard to understand, and extremely repetitive. However, the repetition functions wonderfully as an emphasis to what the author is feeling, or trying to express. Overall, not a bad read. Just takes a lot of time and patience to really absorb the novel.