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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.
What book or books are you reading this week? (01/09/2025)
Re: The Rest is Memory by Lily Tuck I just heard a podcast with the author this morning and I added this book to my library tbr. Do you have any comments to share about it @Cindy_R ?
-Anne_Glasgow
"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.
Lily Tuck was born in Paris and lived in Thailand in the early '60s. She is the author of two previous novels: Interviewing Matisse, Or the Woman Died Standing Up and The Woman Who Walked on Water. She has written numerous short stories, the most recent of which have been published in The New Yorker, Fiction, and The Antioch Review.
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