Wartime lies - Louis Begley [0]
Told with haunting grace and austerity, of a golden childhood into which anguish creeps gradually and imperceptibly … Powerfully told.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Stunning … Captures the unequivocal dread and evil of those years with stark and haunting prose, for Maciek’s young voice is so pure—so unselfconsciously honest—that it etches itself into the memory like writing on stone … Wartime Lies has a sense of being written from the darkest and most private chambers of a man’s heart.”
—The Boston Globe
“An artful, beautifully written novel that tells the powerful story of a boy and his aunt—Polish Jews—caught in the horror of the Holocaust. Alone together, these two manage to survive the unbearable, saving their lives with mundane and brilliant lies.”
—Jean Strouse
“Chilling … Begley writes with a kind of muted and stunned air, as if the words are sticking in his throat. The exquisite soft note of the master writer of the genre, Primo Levi, is sometimes heard in the novel.”
—The New York Review of Books
“Remarkable … A work of power and eloquence.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“A virtuoso (and virtuous) accomplishment … What Louis Begley’s vividly austere prose embodies is an immaculate act of witness in the form of a novel … Begley raises fresh and risky questions about quarry and hunter, volition and obedience, decency and ideology.”
—Cynthia Ozick
“EXCEPTIONAL … GRIPPING FROM BEGINNING TO END.
Every word rings true. In the ever-burgeoning field of Holocaust literature, this novel stands out as a masterfully told tale, exceptional in its detailing of everyday life as led by the hunted, to whom no day was ordinary.”
—The Miami Herald
“Spare and beautifully written … Wartime Lies is a meditation on the human capacity for every kind of abomination and for self-sacrifice and heroism as well.”
—Daniel Aaron
“A profound work of art—haunting, terrifying, and absolutely enthralling.”
—James Chace
“Haunting … The book takes the reader into the nightmarish world of Polish anti-Semitism and the Germanic insistence on carrying out the Final Solution…. The child grows into manhood deformed by years on the run, knowing full well that he escaped the horror, but he can’t free himself from its memory.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Haunting, powerful … [A] searing story of the quest for an authentic self in an insane world.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A marvel of compression, recollection, and lyric intensity.”
—Shana Alexander
For my mother
TAKE a man with a nice face and sad eyes, fifty or more winters on his back, living a moderately pleasant life in a tranquil country. He is a bookish fellow, the sort you would expect to find in a good publishing house or at a local university teaching how to compare one literature with another. He might even be a literary agent with a flair for dissident writing: texts bearing witness against oppression and inhumanity. Sometimes, in the evening, he reads Latin classics. There is no question anymore of his being able to do a version. He learned Latin in great globs to pass whatever examination happened to be blocking his path, always in the very nick of time; his knowledge was never precise. Fortunately, the power to grasp meaning and to remember has remained. He reveres the Aeneid. That is where he first found civil expression for his own shame at being alive, his skin intact and virgin of tattoo, when his kinsmen and almost all the others, so many surely more deserving than he, perished in the conflagration.
He takes care to keep the metaphor at a distance. His native town in eastern Poland was no Ilium, and even if some SS black-shirt, imperturbably beating an aged former human being with a riding crop, is a pretty good stand-in for Pyrrhus slaughtering Priam, where, in that senseless tableau, are the contending golden-haired gods and goddesses? He has seen such a beating, administered to a totally bald man forced to kneel, the blows aimed at the top of the head, the man’s hands folded behind his back, unable to wipe the blood streaming