Publisher : Recorded Books
Publication Date : 2006 01 01
>> Moving and inspirational
In Night Elie Wiesel has shared his life and tragedy with those of us who could not in our wildest dreams imagine what the victims of Hitler and Nazism endured All my adult life I am 64 I have heard stories of the holocaust and how Jews as well as others not to Nazi liking suffered Until I read Night I was in darkness no pun intended Everyone should read this short presentation if they wish to understand just how evil man can be to each other and just how important it is that we NEVER forget I also cannot imagine how I would have reacted if I were in the same situation I cannot imagine I would have had the courage to survive I am not prone to attach the label of hero to many humans although I do recognize individual acts of heroism on occasion However if not for his courage and his survival then certainly for his openness in sharing his story with the world his continuous efforts to educate those who do not know and his tenacity I will declare that to me Elie Wiesel is a hero I spent only a day reading the entire book I will not forget him for the rest of my life I know of no hero I would rather meet in person than this man This book is also excellent material for teachers who wish to introduce their students to this part of history Note The copy of the book I read has nothing to do with Oprah s Book club although the Amazon listing says it does
>> Sheering images ambiguous text
This work about one teenage boy surviving a series of Nazi concentration camps is haunting and poignant There are scenes that will stay with you for the rest of your life even if you would wish to forget them What really shocked me was the sheer selfishness of the inmates this every man for himself mentality as family members ultimately turn on each other In this sense there s little to be said about what is a lyrical poem about living in as close to hell as anyone has ever had to suffer through
That said I wish I knew what genre this was I would have a better sense of my own emotional reaction if it weren t for the controversies surrounding the book At first blush it appears to be a memoir But finding out that it is part of a trilogy in which the latter two volumes are explicitly novels gives pause As does finding out that this is a redaction of an 800 page manuscript And that the translation changes some of the meanings most famously the paragraph about sex and revenge on the last page I can t read Yiddish so I don t know whether the original really said rape All I can say is that the paragraph in English doesn t make any psychological sense which makes me wonder whether the translation is in fact accurate
Cutting a work by over 80 percent can have several effects First it can create meaning by implying cause and effect where there wasn t necessarily any Similarly such redaction can completely change the emotional tenor of a work When a year of the most evil torment are turned into a hundred page work an editor is likely to select the most awful or memorable moments This compression can the experience seem surreal Also such drastic cutting can make the reduced text very choppy
All of these qualities are present in this text Much of it especially towards the beginning seems rather literary like the work is going to be a theological parable Everything feels so laden with irony and foreshadowing Then the story becomes scattershot and ultimately collapses into selfishness amongst the inmates I suspect the individual sentences are literally true but the meaning of them might have been obscured by the massive editing The inmates turning on each other so fiercely for instance might have happened but have caught the editor s eye precisely because it was so rare not because it was so common And for the randomness of the middle of the work is this Wiesel trying to convey the sheer gratuitousness of the violence and the absurdity of the Germans trying to organize such misery bureaucratically Or is it simply the editor trying to select out passages designed to describe something in detail and have them stand for longer periods of time It frustrates me that I can t tell
Ultimately what I got out of this is a better understanding of the experience of the psychology of the concentration camps Writers seem to react to the Holocaust by often adopting a strictly realist style The facts of the situation are so overwhelming that words that try to explain what it felt like to experience seem hopelessly inadequate so authors chose flat description Night however takes a different approach It does try to convey the interior experience like how otherworldly the billowing and rank furnaces made entrance into Auschwitz feel
It seems almost tasteless to have to put a star ranking on a work about the Shoah What could such a ranking possibly mean
>> Couldn t stop reading
I could not put the book down As soon as I opened the package I started reading and was finished with it a few hours later I am usually a few pages a day kind of reader
There was some terminology that I didn t understand but that didn t stop me from reading
