The Long Voyage

by Jorge Semprún

Book Overview

A young Spaniard captured with 119 others fighting with the French Resistance counts off the days and nights as the truck rolls slowly but inexorably towards Buchenwald. During the seemingly endless journey, he has conversations that range from his childhood to speculations about the death camps. When at last the fantastic, Wagnerian gates to Buchenwald come into sight, the young Spaniard is left alone to face the camp. A profound literary account,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805209468
• ISBN13: 9780805209464
• Release Date: March 1990
• Publisher: Schocken Books Inc
• Length: 236 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

The long silence of the lambs

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.

Journey to the unknown

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.

A wonderful and moving novel

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.