Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Historical adventure fiction

THE REST IS MEMORY

Lily Tuck

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. Lily Tuck, the winner of the National Book Award for The News from Paraguay, is the author of seven novels, three short story collections, and a biography of Elsa Morante. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, she lives in New York.

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Book Published 2024-12-01 by Liveright

Comments

Though brief and austere, this novel is epic in its power to restore: first a girl, then her family and at last an epoch in human history. Addictively compulsive, Lily Tuck's story powers forward like the growing tragedy it chronicles, yet it never sacrifices the human moments, serenely and tenderly observed. Like a white stork rising from a dark forest, The Rest is Memory fills the silence with a great beating of wings.

The Rest is Memory is a literary resurrection, as shattering as it is astonishing. Lily Tuck has done the impossible; from darkness and hideous cruelty, she has woven an unforgettable paean to hope, to life, to justice.

A wonderful novel, as formally innovative and controlled and moving as any I have read in a long while. Lily Tuck is a stunning prose writer, a true original.

Lily Tuck writes with sensitivity of a young girl's struggle to understand unanswerable questions, conveying with subtlety, even tenderness the girl's capacity to wonder despite her peril, and the inevitable anguish that awaits her. The book is beautifully written, all the while instilling a sense of horror which we would be heedless to forget.

The imagined and humane portions of Lily Tuck's unflinching novella - the recollected affections and longings, the past routines now violently vanished- descend as softly and miraculously as the snowflakes caught by the tongue of its doomed young heroine.

With graphic imagery and lyrical prose, 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.

Lily Tuck has made an extraordinary and disturbingly brilliant novel, one that can stand with the best of W.G. Sebald or Patrick Modiano, and The Zone of Interest too, as a testament to what we must always remember.