Night, by Elie Wiesel

• Pub. Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Pages: 144

 

Rating: 5/5

Synopsis

 

A New Translation From The French By Marion Wiesel
Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man's capacity for inhumanity to man.

Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.


Review

I've had this book for quite a while, but decided to read it yesterday and was unable to put it down until I had finished the last page. My heart still hurts , knowing that this is not fiction. I also wonder if the world can feel it's sadness - this week has been balmy, but today, a biting wind has broken the perfect weather. Of course, stories have a tendency to alter the emotion of the reader, but some, like this book, linger.

Wiesel has an abrupt style, but I really like it and think it fits with the topic and time. He also was successful with connecting to me as the reader: In the beginning, no one could believe that such things were possible, that people were capable of such evil. If that were to happen today, it would be almost a repeat because who would believe such madness? Even worse than this (in some sense) is the countless times when Elie and his family could have escaped but did not. It must be terribly disconcerting for him to know (now) that there were exits all throughout his nightmare.

Although short, the author makes up in sheer impact what lacks in length. I also have to wonder if it would be unbearable to read if it were any longer. In movies, and maybe books alike, it seems that we judge a story as 'good' or 'bad' by the ending. Most tragedies, whether said aloud or not, we internally think of them as bad because the ending was not wrapped up with a perfect bow; we are left hanging, incomplete somehow. Inside, I think of this book as bad in the way that it saddens me and shows the horrific side of human nature, BUT in the same breath I will say that as a story it altered my emotions and perception, in a way comparable to that of real life. Isn't that what makes a successful story?