"Never shall I forget that night, that first night in camp, which turned my life into one long night..."
This is a hard book to review because of its sheer power and emotional impact it had on me. When it comes to non-fiction that is this harrowing, I question how justified I am in critiquing it at all. Short answer: I'm not. Instead I'll express the facts. Night is one man's story of his experiences in concentration camps during World War II. Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968 for his "message of peace and commitment to embrace all repressed peoples and races." Sharing his experience in WWII concentration camps was Wiesel's first step in his call for peace and tolerance toward Jews and other persecuted religious and racial groups. The title "Night" works on a few different levels. Most simply, it's a metaphor for the sense of darkness that permeated Nazi controlled Europe, signifying the idea that the days felt like night because of the gloom and despair that continuously pervaded day to day life. There was also a reoccurring theme of disappearing into the night, being taken from the places you once called home without a trace. The novel reads like fiction, communicating the horrific cruelty that the human race is capable of and the incredible instinct to survive in a nearly hopeless situation. Night. No one was praying for the night to pass quickly. The stars were but sparks of the immense conflagration that was consuming us. Were this conflagration to be extinguished one day, nothing would be left in the sky but extinct stars and unseeing eyes.
Needless to say, Night does not end on a hopeful note. Wiesel states, "One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed me never left me." This was a tough book to read; its an intensely disturbing account of torture and trauma, physically and mentally. I was thankful it was on the shorter side because I honestly don't know that I could handle a 300-plus page novel so intense. Wiesel's followup to the book, Dawn, was published in 1960. I can only hope (and loosely assume based on its title) that he was able to begin to cope with the horrific experiences he endured. I read this for the classics challenge, fulfilling a classic literature in translation. Publisher: Hill and Wang, 1955
I'm sure you've heard of it. Maus is the story of a Jewish survivor, Vladek, in Hitler's Poland as told by Vladek's son, Art, a cartoonist. The complete Maus won the Pulitzer Prize Special Award in 1992. The structure of the novel weaves together two storylines: that of the modern day life that Vladek and Art experience and that of Jews living in WWII Nazi regime. This narrative framework is remarkable, as it places the reader inside of a unique story line; we learn of the narrator's father's tale of survival as he recounts it to his son, who takes notes for the book he is writing. The product is a heartbreaking and captivating graphic memoir in which the Jews are portrayed as mice, and the Nazis as cats.
I read this book in one sitting, which isn't a feat considering it's a 160 page graphic novel. Regardless, I didn't want to put it down and I'm upset I didn't just go ahead and buy Maus II along with the first. Those tricky publishers should have released them as one novel in the first place. But I digress, what makes this such a memorable novel that it's not only about WWII, it's also about history itself; how it's told, how it's remembered and how it effects generations to come. It also examines the complicated nature of families and the uniqueness of father/son relationships; the generational differences that ultimately cause tension and the difficulties of understanding one another.
Maus has been critiqued for portraying such a horrific and monstrous period in history in a unsympathetic medium, therefore downplaying the enormity of the Nazi regeme. However, I would argue that instead of belittling the subject matter, it actually portrays it in a haunting manner, expressing ideas and emotions that sometimes only pictures and illustrations can evoke.
Since Maus I ends quite abruptly, I plan on reading Maus II very soon.
Publisher: Pantheon Books, 1986
