The Rest Is Memory: A Novel
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First glimpsed riding on the back of a boyâs motorcycle, fourteen-year-old Czeslawa comes to life in this mesmerizing novel by Lily Tuck, who imagines her upbringing in a village in southeastern Poland before her world imploded in late 1942. Stripped of her modest belongings, shorn, tattooed number 26947 on arriving at Auschwitz, Czeslawa is then photographed by prisoner Wilhelm Brasse. Three months later she is dead.
How did thisâthe fictionalized account of a real person who was Catholicâhappen? This is the question that Tuck grapples with in this haunting novel, which frames Czeslawaâs story within the epic tragedy of six million Poles, Jewish and Catholic, who perished during the German occupation. Also evoking, among others, the writer Tadeusz Borowskiâs ill-fated life and Janusz Korczakâs valorous attempts to save orphaned children, Czeslawa becomes an unforgettable work of historical reclamation that rescues an innocent life, one previously only recalled by a stark triptych of photographs.
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Lily Tuck, the winner of the National Book Award for The News from Paraguay, is the author of seven novels, three short story collections, and a biography of Elsa Morante. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, she lives in New York.
