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The heartbreaking story of a young Catholic girl transported to Auschwitz becomes a Rashomon-like rondo in the hands of one of our greatest novelists.
First glimpsed riding on the back of a boy's motorcycle, fourteen-year-old Czeslawa comes to life in this mesmerizing novel by Lily Tuck, who imagines her upbringing in a village in southeastern Poland before her world imploded in late 1942. Stripped of her modest belongings, shorn, tattooed number 26947 on arriving at Auschwitz, Czeslawa is then photographed by prisoner Wilhelm Brasse. Three months later she is dead.
How did this―the fictionalized account of a real person who was Catholic―happen? This is the question that Tuck grapples with in this haunting novel, which frames Czeslawa's story within the epic tragedy of six million Poles, Jewish and Catholic, who perished during the German occupation. Also evoking, among others, the writer Tadeusz Borowski's ill-fated life and Janusz Korczak's valorous attempts to save orphaned children, Czeslawa becomes an unforgettable work of historical reclamation that rescues an innocent life, one previously only recalled by a stark triptych of photographs.
"Extensively annotated and researched, Tuck's brief novel returns, time and time again, to the subject of memories, a theme alluded to in an epigraph consisting of a fragment of a Louise Glück poem. The author's skillful blending of facts and fiction reanimates the memory of one of the countless lost children of the Holocaust. A painful, essential, unflinching memento." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Tuck vividly evokes Czeslawa's innocence and resilience, as she tries to hold out hope by imagining Anton in Auschwitz with her. It's an unforgettable portrait of buoyant youth in the grimmest of places." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
This information about The Rest Is Memory was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Born in Paris, Lily Tuck is the author of Interviewing Matisse or The Woman Who Died Standing Up (1991); The Woman Who Walked on Water (1996); Siam or the Woman Who Shot a Man: A Novel (1999); The News From Paraguay (2004), winner of the 2004 National Book Award; and I Married You For Happiness (2011). She is also the author of a book of short stories entitled Limbo, or Other Places I Have Lived (2002) and a biography, Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante (2002). Her short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Fiction, and the Antioch Review. She divides her time between Maine and New York City and has lived in Thailand, Uruguay and Peru.
Libby Lost and Found
by Stephanie Booth
Libby Lost and Found is a book for people who don't know who they are without the books they love.
The low brow and the high brow
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
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