The Rest Is Memory: A Novel [Paperback]

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. A short but searing new novel by Lily Tuck. . . . [T]he National Book Award winner brings to vivid life just one of the thousands killed in the Nazi death camp. . . . As Tuck shows us in this short, brutal book, Czeslawa Kwoka was a human being rather than a statistic, robbed of a life that can only be imagined. Clocking in at just 144 pages, this slim novel will devastate you all in one sitting . . . Haunting and austere, An extraordinary achievement. . . . Like much of her output, including her mesmerizing The haunting story of one real-life Polish teenager amplifies the infinite horror of Auschwitz....With myriad references to the historical realities of the Holocaust, the work beautifully interweaves Tucks imagined story of Czeslawas constrained life before the German occupation and the hideous conditions she faced during her short, brutal months at Auschwitz. Extensively annotated and researched, Tucks 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 Gl?ck poem. The author's skillful blending of facts and fiction reanimates the memory of one of the countless lost children of the Holocaust. A painful, essential, unflinching memento. 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 Czeslawas innocence and resilience, as she tr