The Long Voyage

by Jorge Semprun

Other authorsRichard Seaver (Translator)

Paperback, 1997

Status

Available

Call number

940

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Collection

Your library

Publication

Penguin Classics (1997), Paperback, 240 pages

Description

"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."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member labfs39

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.

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LibraryThing member CliffBurns

One of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust I know of. Intense, unrelenting...almost unendurably sad.

LibraryThing member claude_lambert

Semprun is the best French novelist of the second half of the 20th century (it has been a terrible time for French literature, no surprise that the light came from Spain). The book is about the travel in train of war prisoners from France to the concentration camp of Buchenwald. 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 style, 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 (when he was 16), a resistant, years of intellectual misery when he discovered what communism really was, then as a Minister of Culture in the Spanish government. What is left for us is an incomparable writer.

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LibraryThing member jonfaith

We were not there. One has to bypass Adorno. Acknowledging that, a sensual inventory of the Shoah becomes an imperative. Fatelessness is an example of such, as is this. It is a challenge. Semprun achieves the act, the consummation. Suggestions wilt, cower and abandon. He perseveres.

We do not know.

Semprun relates, he apprehends, he fashions the verse from ash and yields a chuckle as gratuity.

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