The Rest Is Memory, a heartbreaking story of a young Catholic girl transported to Auschwitz, becomes a Rashomon-like rondo by one of our greatest novelists.
In This Spotlight On The Rest Is Memory
About The Rest Is Memory
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 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 Czeslawa’s story within the 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 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, she was accompanied by her mother and her neighbors, her tattoo number, and the date of her death.
Tuck’s novel becomes a remarkable kaleidoscopic feat of imagination, something only our greatest novelists can do.
Tuck’s language swirls about, yet not a word is out of place. The subtly rotating images tumble out at us, accelerating as we learn about Czeslawa’s tragic stay in Auschwitz, the lives of real people such as the barbaric Commandant Rudolf Höss; 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 Czeslawa’s fate, we have no choice but to keep turning the pages, thoroughly mesmerized by Tuck’s near otherworldly prose.In Lily Tuck’s 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.
Praise for The Rest Is Memory
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, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“The haunting story of one real-life Polish teenager amplifies the infinite horror of Auschwitz….the work beautifully interweaves Tuck’s imagined story of Czeslawa’s constrained life before the German occupation and the hideous conditions she faced during her short, brutal months at Auschwitz….Tuck’s brief novel returns, time and time again, to the subject of memories, a theme alluded to in an epigraph consisting of a fragment of a Louise Glück poem. The author’s skillful blending of facts and fiction reanimates the memory of one of the countless lost children of the Holocaust.”—Kirkus Reviews
In The Rest Is Memory, “Tuck (Sisters) draws on the true story of a Polish Catholic girl who died in Auschwitz in her unflinching latest…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.”—Publishers Weekly
“Tuck’s profound historical novel [The Rest Is Memory] imagines Czeslawa’s life leading up to this photograph and during her time at Auschwitz… Tuck intersperses Czeslawa’s haunting narrative with varied historical accounts and figures, holding a resolute eye to the atrocities of the time and the lives cut short.”—Booklist
“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.”—Adam Johnson, author of the National Book Award–winning Fortune Smiles
“A wonderful novel, as formally innovative, controlled, and moving as any I have read in a long while. Lily Tuck is a stunning prose writer, a true original.”—Phillip Lopate, author of A Year and a Day
“Lily Tuck writes with sensitivity of a young girl’s struggle to understand…the inevitable anguish that awaits her. Beautifully written, all the while instilling a sense of horror.”—Susanna Moore, author of The Lost Wife“A name, a photograph, a tattooed number. Not much more is known about Czeslawa Kwoka, a Polish Catholic girl who died in Auschwitz on March 12, 1943. But out of those few dry facts 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.”—Michael Gorra, author of The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War
About Lily Tuck, Author of The Rest Is Memory
Photo by Julie Thayer
Born in Paris, Lily Tuck, was the winner of the National Book Award for The News from Paraguay. She is the author of seven novels, three short story collections, and her 2008 biography Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante won the Premio Elsa Morante. Her novel Siam was nominated for the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, she lives in New York.
Source: Publisher, Wikipedia
Publisher: Liveright
ISBN: 9781324095729
Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2024
Titles by Lily Tuck
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