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Literature or Life

by Jorge Semprun

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Memory, imprisonment, and the struggle to write

$23.14 USD
$36.16 USD $23.14 USD
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Paperback New English

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AlbakiReads Editorial

Memory, imprisonment, and the struggle to write

Jorge Semprun’s account connects his imprisonment at Buchenwald with the years before and after his time in the camp. It also follows his repeated, painful attempts to shape that experience into a book. The description presents writing not as a separate act of remembrance, but as part of the lasting aftermath of imprisonment. With its focus on personal memory across several periods of a life, the memoir places individual experience within the history of the Holocaust.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in personal accounts of the Holocaust and Buchenwald.
  • Readers seeking historical biography that spans events before and after wartime imprisonment.
  • Readers interested in the relationship between memory, lived experience, and writing.

Themes

Holocaust and imprisonmentPersonal memoryWriting and remembranceLife before and after trauma

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

Jorge Semprun was twenty years old - already an accomplished philosopher and poet - when arrested by Nazis for activites in the French Resistance. He was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. Literature or Life, a bestseller in France, is a deeply personal account not only of Semprun's time at Buchenwald, but also of the years before and after, of his painful attempts to write this book...created out of obsessions that returned him again and again like themes in a nightmarish rhapsody.His long reverie on life-as-death, now translated with the mesmerizing power of fiction. It is a profound contribution to Holocaust literature.

? Semprun was awarded the Jerusalem prize at the 1997 Jerusalem International Book Fair.
? Semprun's first novel, The Long Voyage, won Europe's prestigious Formentor Prize.
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