Read e-book The Long Voyage

Free download. Book file PDF easily for everyone and every device. You can download and read online The Long Voyage file PDF Book only if you are registered here. And also you can download or read online all Book PDF file that related with The Long Voyage book. Happy reading The Long Voyage Bookeveryone. Download file Free Book PDF The Long Voyage at Complete PDF Library. This Book have some digital formats such us :paperbook, ebook, kindle, epub, fb2 and another formats. Here is The CompletePDF Book Library. It's free to register here to get Book file PDF The Long Voyage Pocket Guide.
The Long Voyage Home () Approved | 1h 45min | Drama, War | 22 November (USA) In , the motley crew of the British tramp steamer SS Glencairn prepares the ship for its perilous voyage from the West Indies to Baltimore and then to England.
Table of contents

If it were a war, then start real little: the flutter of an eyelid, the ricochet of a sigh, the gossamer feel of A pattern formeth. If it were a war, then start real little: the flutter of an eyelid, the ricochet of a sigh, the gossamer feel of touch, the timbre of a voice, the sustenannce of a scent.

The memory of the Moselle. The acidic aftertaste of a concentration camp: remembered.

The fast forward of time. The fifteen Jewish children, aged years old. Set loose down the Weimar road to the gates of the concentration camp. Given a minute head start. The dogs set loose to hunt. The not one making it to the gates of the camp. The S. The hundreds packed into a freight car. The urine soaked shirts held out into the black of night to cool so compresses could be applied to fainted bodies.

Bodies who never recover but are propped up so their rations can be collected. Semprun, who grapples with his recollections. View all 7 comments.

Chicago Tribune - We are currently unavailable in your region

Feb 27, [P] rated it really liked it. Whenever something terrible happens — the Paris attacks, a school shooting, or whatever — people invariably express their shock and surprise, and I always feel slightly bewildered by this kind of reaction, because, although I could not possibly have foreseen these specific events, I am nevertheless profoundly not shocked nor surprised [although I am, of course, deeply saddened by them].

Human history, and my own experiences to a lesser extent, has taught me that we are capable of, that we Whenever something terrible happens — the Paris attacks, a school shooting, or whatever — people invariably express their shock and surprise, and I always feel slightly bewildered by this kind of reaction, because, although I could not possibly have foreseen these specific events, I am nevertheless profoundly not shocked nor surprised [although I am, of course, deeply saddened by them].

Human history, and my own experiences to a lesser extent, has taught me that we are capable of, that we actively and regularly engage in, every kind of baseness, brutality or infamy.

Goings on About Town

He lived through WW2, becoming a member of the French resistance, before being arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. He wrote more than one book about his experiences, the most well-known of which is Le grand voyage [The Long Voyage, in English]. I have read many novels about the Holocaust, and of course each of them are different, and certainly each of them has moved me, but this is the first time that I have encountered a narrative voice that truly spoke to me. It is a voice characterised by a lack of disbelief, it is always logical or rational, tough but understanding.

Yes, anything is possible. Death camps. Lampshades made out of human skin. All possible.

Accessibility Links

All, and more. How can you be shocked if you refuse to close your eyes to the truth of the world? And that is what I got from The Long Voyage, a sense that here is an author who felt it important not to shy away from reality. Men will, he says, steal from someone their last piece of black bread, thereby choosing their own life, their own continued existence, over the life of someone else, who is, by virtue of that theft, being condemned to death. It is written with great sensitivity and empathy. Yet, while Semprun puts the reader in a similar situation, which is to say that he forces you to ride along with his characters, his approach is different.

In How it Is, for example, the narrator is lying in the mud murmuring to himself, and attempting to crawl along the ground. He is constrained, and haunted by voices. And what he frequently hears are screams and murmurs, complaints and threats. It is a nightmarish and absurd situation.

Well, of course. Breathing is vital, if you want to live. And these people, who are hurtling towards their death, would like to live, at least a little bit longer, thanks very much. But I must have counted wrong, or else some of the days must have turned into nights. I have a surplus of nights, more nights than I can use. While on the train the narrator spends some of his time looking out of the window, and at one stage he passes through the Moselle Valley. At this precise moment, he says, the world was reborn within him. What he means by this is that in the boxcar he has been cut off from the world, literally and spiritually.

It is only when he passes through the Moselle Valley, when he recognises it, that he reconnects with the world, with what is outside, with a real place.

Site Index

Indeed, the nature of reality, or unreality, plays a major role in the text. In other words, the unreal becomes real. You become accustomed to the bizarre, the grotesque, the appalling, such that a sudden revealing of the existence of, or a confrontation with, the normal is a kind of spiritual shock. On this, there is a wonderful scene in the book when the narrator leaves the camp and comes upon a group of women. Not women with shaved heads, starved to death, beaten and gassed, but women, real women, with stockings and lips and thigh-hugging skirts.

And these creatures seem unreal to him, in the same way that the camp corpses, that he shows them, do to the women. I found this so engaging, for I had thought about our ability to adapt to horrendous circumstances, and our ability to normalise the not-normal, but I had never considered that it might work the other way around.

Hector Zazou & Björk - Vísur Vatnsenda Rósu

As always with these reviews, there is more that I want to discuss, but I fear writing too much and alienating the few people with the necessary patience to read my work. No, I will finish with something about memory. Structurally, The Long Voyage is essentially a kind of Proustian Arabian Nights, if you will allow me this ridiculous phrase, where, instead of stories-within-stories, we encounter memories-within-memories, memories, like bodies in a boxcar, stacked on top of each other. Jan 18, Anastasia Fitzgerald-Beaumont rated it it was amazing. I confess I had never heard of Jorge Semprun, a prominent Spanish writer, politician and former government minister, until I picked up The Long Voyage Le grand voyage , an autobiographical novel based upon his experiences in the Second World War.

The voyage itself, a train journey, is the framework around which this astonishing narrative is constructed, as the author moves back through memory to times past and times future, always returning to a times present, a cattle truck packed full of men, I confess I had never heard of Jorge Semprun, a prominent Spanish writer, politician and former government minister, until I picked up The Long Voyage Le grand voyage , an autobiographical novel based upon his experiences in the Second World War. The voyage itself, a train journey, is the framework around which this astonishing narrative is constructed, as the author moves back through memory to times past and times future, always returning to a times present, a cattle truck packed full of men, a present which itself is only a memory.

The Long Voyage is also available under the English title of The Cattle Truck which seems to me to miss the whole point.

The Long Voyage Home

I bought this book because I have a particular interest in Holocaust literature; it was simply another one in a series. But the reading was not quite as I expected. Translated from the original Spanish, the prose is simple, undemonstrative and superbly crafted. Still, this is no simple tale. Manuel, as Semprun appears in the novel, is a Spanish communist who fled the country after the victory of Franco.

Diagnostic information:

He is later involved in the French Resistance against the Nazis under the code name of Gerard. In he was captured. The horror is compounded by the slowness of the journey, through five days and nights, a journey without food or water, a journey where even air is a premium. When their car is opened they are found mostly dead, either of hunger or of cold.

The car is unloaded as if wood was being transported.

In one, after the liberation in April , when the prisoners can wander around freely, Manuel visits an old lady whose house overlooks the camp, with a clear view of the crematoria. He asks her if she could see the flames in the evening, a rhetorical question, because there is no doubt that she could. Clearly frightened the woman tells Manuel that both her sons were killed in the war; She throws the bodies of her two sons at me for fodder, she takes refuge behind the lifeless bodies of her two sons killed in the war.

No corpse of the German army will ever weight as much as the smoke of one of my dead companions. I understand that for her the death of both of her sons is the most atrocious, the most unjust thing in the world. There is power in words, in the strength to use words; there is power in this remarkable book. Jun 20, Jonfaith rated it it was amazing Shelves: shoah. We were not there. One has to bypass Adorno. Acknowledging that, a sensual inventory of the Shoah becomes an imperative. Fatelessness is an example of such, as is this.

It is a challenge.


  1. Are You Kirst? (n/a).
  2. The Cumberland Road;
  3. The Long Voyage Home.
  4. Navigation menu;
  5. Vice and Folly - The Christmas Chronicles.
  6. You are here.

Semprun achieves the act, the consummation. Suggestions wilt, cower and abandon. He perseveres. We do not know. Semprun relates, he apprehends, he fashions the verse from ash and yields a chuckle as gratuity.