The Rest Is Memory: A Novel

ISBN: 1324097094

Author: Tuck, Lily

Condition: New

The heartbreaking story of a young Catholic girl transported to Auschwitz becomes a Rashomon-like rondo by one of our greatest novelists.Esquire Best Books of Fall 2024"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." -Junot Diaz First glimpsed riding on the back of a boys motorcycle, fourteen-year-old Czeslawa comes to life in this mesmerizing novel by Lily Tuck, who imagines her upbringing in a small Polish village before her world imploded in late 1942. Stripped of her modest belongings, shorn, and tattooed number 26947 on arriving at Auschwitz, Czeslawa is then photographed. Three months later, she is dead.How did this happen to an ordinary Polish citizen? This is the question that Tuck grapples with in this haunting novel, which frames Czeslawas story within the epic tragedy of six million Poles who perished during the German occupation. A decade prior to writing The Rest Is Memory, Tuck read an obituary of the photographer Wilhelm Brasse, who took more than 40,000 pictures of the Auschwitz prisoners. Included were three of Czeslawa Kwoka, a Catholic girl from rural southeastern Poland. Tuck cut out the photos and kept them, determined to learn more about Czeslawa, but she was only able to glean the barest facts: the village she came from, the transport she was on, that she was accompanied by her mother and her neighbors, her tattoo number, and the date of her death. From this scant evidence, Tucks novel becomes a remarkable kaleidoscopic feat of imagination, something only our greatest novelists can do.Beautifully written, all the while instilling a sense of horror (Susanna Moore), Tucks language swirls about, yet not a word is out of place. The subtly rotating images tumble out at us, accelerating as we learn about Czeslawas tragic stay in Auschwitz, the lives of real people such as the barbaric Commandant Rudolf Hss; his unconscionable wife, Hedwig; the psychiatrist and child rescuer Janusz Korczak; and the mordant Polish short story writer Tadeusz Borowski. Although we are certain of Czeslawas fate, we have no choice but to keep turning the pages, thoroughly mesmerized by Tucks near otherworldly prose.In Lily Tucks hands, The Rest Is Memory becomes an unforgettable work of historical reclamation that rescues an innocent life, one previously only recalled by a stark triptych of photographs. 1 map