Night and Hope

by Arnošt Lustig

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0879534001
• ISBN13: 9780879534004
• Release Date: January 1976
• Publisher: Inscape
• Length: 206 Pages

Customer Reviews

Demonic self-contempt

Night and Hope is a collection of seven stories that center around events and personalities in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where the author, Arnost Lustig, was interned during the second world war. He is today most revered as a writer of screenplays, and often referred to as the creative mind behind the Czech New Wave Cinema, predicted on the macabre and gothic sensibilities that beset a troubled youth. Fittingly in these short stories the horror of camp life and the Holocaust is gradually revealed through the eyes of people whose simplicity has been thwarted, and whose thoughts are being suffocated with hopelessness. Lustig has a verve for tarrying through the concerns of the individual, Sartrean in its emphasis, as an agent of his or her own destiny. He explores the nature of personal identity and a search for meaning in a world in which symbols, signs, institutions and language itself have been turned upside down; in which angst and an unfathomable abyss are kept at bay by insitent despair. The way in which his characters - an old shopkeeper, a middle-aged salesman, and two young disillusioned boys among others - react under such conditions is presented as proof that in the face of destruction there is an unvanquished human essence that survives and thrives. This is a Kafkaesque starkness in the prose, adeptly rendered by George Theiner, as the common folks of the varied narratives confront a dreaded consciousness, something Lustig achieves by often shifting the center of the narrative. There is a morbid stalemate that overtakes each character, a quality that seems to distance the author from the more widely read Czech Kundera. This is existential fiction, rather than postmodern, and it is unique in the way it illustrates a demonic self-deception that breeds self-contempt in the simplicity of each portrayal. Lustig, following the Soviet-led invasion of 1968 left the country to eventually settle in the US. After the fall of eastern European communism in 1989, he divided his time between Prague and Washington DC, where he continued to teach at the American University. After his retirement from the American University in 2003, he became a full-time resident of Prague. He was given an apartment in the Prague Castle by then President Vaclav Havel and honored for his contributions to Czech culture.