Vol. 68 No. 3 2001 - page 394

394
PARTISAN REVIEW
be some time before the narrator grasps its meaning. The act of "fore–
membering" gives us a glimpse into how that process will work.
The narrator has a vivid impression of the impact of deathlife on
memory while dining at a friend's house after the war, when his hostess
announces that she has planned a Russian dinner. This triggers a time
warp in consciousness for the narrator, who explains
and so it was that suddenly I had a piece of black bread in my
hand, and mechanically I bit into it, meanwhile continuing the con–
versation. Then, the slightly acid taste of the black bread, the low
mastication of this gritty black bread, brought back, with shocking
suddenness, the marvelous moments when, at camp, we used to eat
our ration of bread...
.I
was sitting there motionless, my ann
raised, with my slightly acid, buttered slice of good black bread in
my hand, and my heart was pounding like a triphammer.
His hostess asks him if anything is the matter, and his reverie continues
"Nothing was the matter. A random thought of no consequence. Obvi–
ously I couldn't tell her that I was in the throes of dying, dying of
hunger, far far from them, far from the wood fire and the words they
were saying."
As someone who had fended off death in Buchenwald, Semprun
belongs to a generation of survivors-their numbers continue to grow
today-who enact in a portion of consciousness "the throes of dying"
even as they move on with their lives. As unnatural dying, mass murder,
or some other form of atrocity spreads across the landscape of moder–
nity, Semprun 's struggle to find for it an artistic voice seems an early
recognition of its complex and disconcerting force. Elie Wiesel once
remarked of his father's miserable end in Buchenwald that the Germans
deprived him not only of his life, but also of his death, and this is the
very paradox from which Semprun seeks to wrest some significance in
his narrative. But the first step is to find a way of expressing the idea
that the meaning of one's life can no longer be separated from the mean–
ingless death of others, and to do this he literally transmutes conscious–
ness into a physical substance and plunges the reader directly into its
wounded core:
In the spongy mass that sits behind my forehead, between my
painful neck and burning temples, where all the throbbing pains in
my body, which is breaking into a thousand pieces of sharp glass,
in that spongy mass from which I would like to be able to draw
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