Though long and occasionally repetitive, this is a charged examination of a surpassingly strange matter and of the masks and...
Acclaimed Spanish novelist Cercas (The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Novel, 2018, etc.) looks deeply at the curious case of a man who wasn’t there.
Enric Marco (b. 1921), a Catalonian metalworker, became a cause célèbre first for having supposedly survived a Nazi concentration camp, for which he received medals and honors, and then for having been exposed for bending the facts to the point of breaking, apparently precisely in order to cash in on the fame. As Cercas digs into the story of this “swarthy, balding, thickset, burly, mustachioed gnome,” Marco moves from object of “moral disgust” to something at once more understandable and more mysterious. Yes, Marco, an anarchist who was on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War (“his memories of this farce, however, are scant and unclear”), did go to Germany during World War II—but apparently voluntarily, having joined a labor detachment for a decent wage. Yes, he did run afoul of the Nazis, but apparently for an ordinary crime. Yes, he was jailed briefly, but he did not do time in the concentration camps, as he attested. Other claims of having been a hero of the Resistance melt away, leaving Cercas with what novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, his friend, had divined at the beginning: “Don’t you get it? Marco is one of your characters!” Cercas ponders the case from every angle: Is it possible, he wonders, that even with the evasions and lies, Marco might tell us something truthful about the experience of fascism? Even though he “needed to be admired, to be a star,” might he not have something to say after all? Who doesn’t enjoy a little self-aggrandizing confabulation? The answers come slowly, deliberately, and certainly not definitively even as Marco transforms himself from man on the street to Holocaust survivor “just as, at a certain point, Alonso Quixano became Don Quixote.”
Though long and occasionally repetitive, this is a charged examination of a surpassingly strange matter and of the masks and fictions we construct.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3281-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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