I finally got around to reading a book that's been waiting for me: A Morning Star by Andre Schwarz-Bart, posthumously finished and published by his wife Simone, whom I identify, rightly or wrongly, as the subject of the only other book (A Woman of Solitude) he wrote after the prizewinning The Last of the Just, the incredibly moving and mystical account of the Holocaust written decades ago.

The new book makes clear why there have been no more books by this incredibly fine writer. Simone tells us in the foreword that he wrote draft after draft of this semi-autobiographical account of the Tragedy and found them all wanting. He could find no language to adequately convey the true horror of his experiences. What he saw and heard and smelled, imprinted on his brain forever, could not be shared without dishonoring his theme. As he says, in his epigraph for Chapter VII :

Staying silent is not enough and talking is too much: we need to find the right cries, mutterings, or start singing a new song that encompasses all words, all silences, all cries.

It is his sense of inadequacy to do the task justice, his very reluctance to put his observations and reflections into words, that the reader intuits from Schwartz-Barts ironic understatement in relating the nature of the events the protagonist experienced. His descriptions of the tragic events are lean, spare. Relatives disappear in a sentence and are never heard from again. God-awful things happen in parenthetical phrases. For me, reading Schwarz-Bart is like communing with a likeminded soul. I get him, and feel his sadness in my bones, with no need for details. On the contrary, I am relieved by the lack of specificity. A reader who can't read between the lines or doesn't know the underlying history, will not like the book. I do.

An epigraph for Chapter VI quotes Moses pleading with God:

If you have reserved such a fate for me, ah! please, let me die instead if I've found favor in your sight, somay no longer see all this affliction. Numbers 11:15

Exactly. ( )