Can novels bring life back to life?

What traces of your life will you leave behind a century after your death? Maybe someone will find discarded clothes or boxes of precious items: china, jewelry, watches, toys. Your signature on official forms and numerous photos may remain, possibly in an outdated file format. What do these scattered items reveal about you? Even if everything from your time on Earth—every letter, text, tax return, piece of furniture and knickknack—was preserved, would you trust researchers using your personal files to accurately describe who you were? What kind of person? , or understand the life you live? Do you want them to speak for you?

Now consider how little of the upheaval in human affairs actually survives. Mold can eat away at diaries and letters. Technology glitches and fires engulf family photos. Natural disasters displace neighbors. The war wiped out the keepers of memory. The series of little things that make up life are so easily blown apart that historians, biographers, and archivists make these quotidian losses part of their process.

But there are other ways to rebuild one's life. The novel thrives on the tiny details most easily forgotten by time, finding opportunity in these open spaces. Whatever cannot be found can be imagined. Here, many writers thrive, creating historical revival works that seek to exhume the dead and lost. Adaniya Shibli and other novels small details Patrick Modiano's two Dora Bruder books delves into personal lives and intimate experiences erased by brutality or tragedy. But efforts to resurrect the Forsaken can be fraught with difficulties – especially when the person brought back is the victim of a shocking atrocity.

In her new novel, The rest is memoryLily Tuck tried this model. About ten years ago, I stumbled across three photos while on a trip. new york times Portrait of a 14-year-old Polish Catholic girl named Czesława Kwoka. In these photos, Ceslawa appears hungry and bruised, with a shaved head and eyes full of fear while she was imprisoned in Auschwitz. These images captured Tucker's heart, and he cut them from the paper and kept them. She could only find the most basic information about the girl with the piercing eyes: Ceslawa came from a small village in southeastern Poland; she arrived in Auschwitz with her mother on December 13, 1942; she had the ID number 26947 tattooed on her body ; and executed on March 12, 1943. Everything else is lost.

Therefore, Tucker aims to fill the void. She describes in the postscript memory “An attempt to resurrect a young life tragically lost.” She imagines Ceslawa's life as a Polish Catholic peasant through a broad set of characteristics that are easily deduced from what is known about her class, era, and family. Tucker wrote that Ceshuava's father, Pawel, poached animals and yelled. A mother who once fell in love with a pilot; a watchdog that gave her anxiety; a favorite orange hen named Kinga; and a youthful obsession with a boy on a motorcycle. Tucker demonstrates these characteristics in a series of fragmented present-tense passages, some of which are declarative—“Her mother’s name was Katarzyna”—and some of which are descriptive, such as about her favorite Food – Cream passage. kapatka cake.

But Tucker also attempts to use structural novelistic detail to illuminate the special lives of the girls and their families. We learn, for example, that her father's laughter “sent shivers down her back” and that he lost the middle finger of his left hand in a “boar-skinning accident,” leaving a stump that still bleeds. . Cheshwava enjoys tasting snow on her tongue, playing with Jack, and reading her favorite books to her grandmother: Wizard Ketechby Janusz Kozak.

Tucker embeds her fictional passages into a series of explicitly nonfiction passages filled with footnoted information about Nazi land policy, the 1940 Katyn massacre, and the workings of Auschwitz, as well as a book about prisoners and photography Excerpt from the book by photographer Wilhelm Brasse, who took the photos that so fascinated Tucker. She cited shady evidence, such as identification numbers, concentration camp records and estimates of the market value of shaved human hair, and used it to expand. Eventually, the novel develops into a network of victims and perpetrators: Polish nobles, other prisoners in the women's barracks, the famous writer Tadeusz Borowski, the camp commander Rudolf Hoss, and his Wife Hedwig.

Throughout these factual sections, Tucker's voice is calm and earthy, befitting the overwhelming horror of the subject matter. Placed next to naturalistic fiction, they are shocking, especially as Tucker jumps between the two modes. A brief description of how the ashes and excrement of Auschwitz prisoners were dumped into the Vistula and Sola rivers is followed by a discussion between the two girls about swimming – a disturbing evocation of demonic domesticity . Tucker refuses to let us enjoy the comforts of fiction, to keep truth at a safe distance from fiction. She asks us to consider them side by side, two expressions of the same material.

This approach firmly establishes the context of Ceshuawa's suffering and death. But according to Tucker, memory The intention was to resurrect her, but here the author made a mistake. Details of her vision for Czeslawa recur throughout the novel, first as descriptions and then as conversations in the concentration camp, cruelly distorted by circumstance: her youthful conception of kapatka Condensed into a reflection on hunger. However, when juxtaposed with long lists of facts and figures, these inventions appear flimsy and can easily be dwarfed by the literature. The more grounded Tucker makes the world around her protagonist, the less certain the writer becomes about her portrayal. Of course, there was more to her life than her chickens, her mother, her cakes, and her death. Of course, she also has the annoyances, irritability, and mood swings that are both characteristic of, and distinct from, her parents, neighbors, and exterminated rednecks. But unable or unwilling to fully imagine these things, Tucker reduces Ceshuawa to a mixture of facts, details, and anecdotes—a man looking from the outside in. The author is not a novelist but a prosecutor, establishing the facts of the case but losing the texture of experience, that is: the distinction between life and evidence.

Of course, bringing the dead back to life is no easy task. To embrace their voices means to risk erasing their voices entirely—and when other writers attempt this, they usually acknowledge their own limitations. exist small details“Adaniya Shibli” was released in English in 2020 and tells the true story of the rape and murder of a Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers in 1949. Like Tucker, she breaks down her narrative, describing it first from the perspective of the child's murderer and then from the perspective of a fictional modern-day Palestinian woman whose investigation of the burial led to her own death. The novel shows that a recurrence of such atrocities is inevitable due to the laws and restrictions put in place by the original perpetrators.

Shibli's narrator's interest in her subject is purely coincidental: the murder occurred on her birthday, 25 years after she was born. Patrick Modiano feels a similar kinship with the subject of his two books, which tell the story of a young Jewish girl who disappears in a part of Paris he knows very well. At first, the Nobel laureate knew little more about Dora Bruder than a missing persons report published on New Year's Eve 1941: describing a “young girl… age 15, height 1 m 55” “, round face, blazer and “brown sneakers”. Dora breaks curfew and escapes from her parents who seek help from the public. This description attracted him, and in his 1990 novel, honeymoonhe imagined her life as a fugitive who survived the Holocaust by meeting a man and escaping to the south.

Yet this imaginary existence was not enough for him. Over the next few years, Modiano continued to investigate Dora's story, uncovering her birth certificate, family photos, and ultimately the discovery of her death in the Ceshuava concentration camp on September 18, 1942 Records of his deportation to Auschwitz six months before his murder. For his follow-up work on Dora, titled Brother Dora After her, Modiano had far more data than Tucker did, allowing him to incorporate other forms of evidence, such as a letter from a deportee found at a bookstall along the Seine.

still, Brother Dora Also filled with many qualifications; Maybe Probably the author's favorite word. There was so much he didn't know and would never find out—including where Dora went after she escaped. “I will never know how she spent[those]days,” he concluded. “It is a poor and precious secret that even the executioners, the decrees, the occupation authorities, the warehouses, the barracks, the concentration camps, the history, the time — nothing that it stains and destroys you — has been able to take away from her. “This gap, this absence, yes Dora Bruder refuses to fill the void, and Modiano lets the absentee testify on her behalf: she hid, she lived, and for a time she was a person beyond the incomplete image evoked by all this evidence. people. Her escape from the author means greater spiritual liberation. He wisely lets her go.

exist memoryTucker also seeks knowledge beyond her reach. But rather than acknowledge this irreparable emptiness, she attempts to mend it with her ultimately inadequate inventions, creating a fiction that can only collapse inward when surrounded by so many indisputable facts. . Some holes are impossible to fill, and no writer, no matter how skilled, can return their subject to something truly resembling life.