The Rest Is Memory: A Novel [Hardcover]

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.The heartbreaking story of a young Catholic girl transported to Auschwitz becomes a Rashomon-like rondo by one of our greatest novelists. The book is exactly as harrowing as longer Auschwitz novels inevitably are, but its beautiful, spare, unflinching language and its insistence on the primacy and persistence of human dignity  and, yes, its brevity  make a brutal story more bearable. The overwhelming force of the novel comes from the sense it conveys of the relentless march of historical events.... None of this makes for easy reading, but its part of Tucks great skill that the story never loses momentum under its own emotional weight. Every page contains something interesting as well as moving.... Its a deeply impressive achievement from a wonderful writer and loses none of its power from the fact that the ground has been well covered. This slender, potent novel imagines the life of Czeslawa Kwoka, a Catholic teen-ager from the Zamosc region of Poland, who was killed in Auschwitz in 1943. Tuck deftly animates Czeslawa and her family, situating their lives within the larger context of Hitlers effort to eradicate Poland and its culture. The novel sets up a powerful contrast between its intimately rendered characters and its steady accretion of facts delineating the objective horror of life in Auschwitz. Tuck weaves her story around the photo, part of a triptych of images of Czeslawa, and anchors it within a carapace of historical fact. Her tale, structured as a series of short takes, is a shimmeringly delicate invention. Cool and spare, the third-person narrative zigzags througls&