Volume 7, Number 1 · July 28, 1966
The Insulted and Injured
By John Wain
The Gates of the Forest
by Elie Wiesel, translated by Frances Frenaye
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 226 pp., $4.95
The Last Gentleman
by Walker Percy
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 416 pp., $5.95
The Night Visitor and Other Stories
by B. Traven
Hill & Wang, 235 pp., $4.95
Elie Wiesel, who as a child was deported to Auschwitz and survived only by a remote chance, has experienced in his own person the ravages of an evil so vile as to be almost beyond comprehension; and he has courageously set himself the task of comprehending it in literature. Wiesel has already written a documentary account of his experience in his shattering short book Night (1958); now, in The Gates of the Forest, he works over the theme again, this time not only as a witness and victim but in the spirit of a man trying to solve an urgent philosophical problem: Having survived, how can we go on living in a world where such things happen?
Review, 2769 words
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