Memoirs covering the author's life before World War II: his years as a youth and an adolescent.
The central themes are the exile of his family, the secrets of Paris, first sex and contact with women and ... the way how he mastered the French language.
This novel flows like a stream, full of natural associations, digressions and flashbacks, mingling the past and the present.
It is a defence of the independence of the artist, the writer, but also a bitter attack on his own past and his old home, the communist party, the ideology (the dialectic) and the régimes (Cuba).
What is, for Semprun, the sense of his life, of all life: life is not the highest good. Other values transcend life: freedom, dignity and independence. Otherwise life is not worth to be lived.
This book is a direct and indirect plea for a more 'human' world.
Not to be missed.

Masterfully written memoirs which cover the years 1944-1964 (from Buchenwald to his expulsion out of the Spanish communist party).
A compelling tale with natural mingling of past and present and brilliant associations.
Semprun gives us a memorable picture of the terrible atmosphere in Buchenwald with its different classes of prisoners (based on the functions they exercised), the starvations, the hangings.
Remarkable are his reminiscences of the infightings at the top of the communist parties (e.g. the struggle for the succession of Stalin and the liquidation of Beria, or the cynicism of a Santiago Carrillo), of the relations between the CP's of different countries (Brothers, they said, yes, like Cain and Abel), the sclerosis of the ideology (Hegel and his dialectic used to justify everything necessary to keep the power) and the betrayal of the intellectuals, mesmerized by the power of the omnipotent party.
This book is a bitter confession, where the author looks back at the cruel (physical and mental) past, his own past, with unbelief.
A masterpiece.

Jorge Semprún is one of the many survivors of the Holocaust who has left his memoirs written to the later generations. But what makes him different is the fact that he did not wrote just what he saw or lived: he wanted us readers to know the feelings, the thoughts and the worries that accompanied and still accompany a Buchenwald prisoner as well. Their words are not hateful to the Germans, nor show pity or regret towards the writer himself or his former fellows. Semprún does not analyze tha causes or the consecuences of his experience, he seems more to go through them once again, but from a diferent point of view: that of the free men. From there, he tries to explain things; not in a very reasonable or settled order, but simply as they come to his mind. The structure of the book reminds that of our own memories: fragmented, realistic, or perhaps a little more distant as time goes by; uncomplete. That lack of organisation makes the book even more sincere and pure, while still keeping a beautiful prose to tell the most amazing horrors.
A must for anyone who is interested in the Holocaust and its survivors, who are fading silently as time goes on.

Jorge Semprun was born in Spain and while studying philosophy in Paris, he was arrested. Accused of being member of the resistance, he was sent to Buchenwald where he spent 18 months before the camp was liberated. "Literature or Life" is his account of what it meant to survive Buchenwald, from the perspective of a highly intellectual mind. It represents a desperate search for understandiing the horrors of Evil, using philosophy and literature as reasoning tools, as well as psychological justification for survival. It is literature of the "living dead!"

In this elegant piece of literary philosophy, Semprun treats readers to an extraordinarily rich remembrance of two years in Buchenwald. This work is shot through with memories of his life before, during and after the war and references to many of the thinkers and writers he has known. Passages as delicate as lace adorn chapters sound as bedrock. You could do much worse than to build a set of Holocaust readings on this foundation.

One aspect making this an especially vibrant Holocaust testimony is that Semprun is not Jewish. While he approaches the subject of Jewish suffering with sympathy, gravity and deep respect, his reminiscences are framed by a lifetime of learning and an important non-Jewish perspective. Readers taste the suffering Semprun has experienced through continuing memories and glimpse what must have driven celebrated Jewish survivors like Paul Celan, Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski to suicide.

Another laudable feature is Semprun's sure knowledge that in politics, as in everything, there is such a thing as paramount Evil, to which philosophers like Heidegger contributed. Deep thinking alone does not, according to his view, constitute righteousness. Semprun elegantly examines ends and means as well as thought processes, dramatically dismissing the moral relativism common among intellectuals these days.

Despite the difficult subject matter, I found this work highly educational--and eminently hopeful and uplifting. Alyssa A. Lappen

I read this book because I was, and still am, interested in what happened during the Holocaust. I was hoping that I would find a lot of new and interesting things in this book, but I was disappointed. The book focuses on the tiresome journey to the camp, instead of what happens at the camp. The plot is also panoramic, and not episodic, so it is hard to understand which happens first, later, or at the present. The author uses really long sentences that is hard to understand, and extremely repetitive. However, the repetition functions wonderfully as an emphasis to what the author is feeling, or trying to express. Overall, not a bad read. Just takes a lot of time and patience to really absorb the novel.

Jorge Semprun was born in Spain but has lived most of his life in France. At a young age he joined the communist party and while active at the French resistance was captured by the Nazis. "The Long Voyage" is an autobiographical narrative, concentrating on the author's experience while being transported in a train to Buchenwald. Contrary to most Holocaust literature, this book is not a compilation of horrors and atrocities, but a stream-of consciousness description of a journey to the unknown, when time has ceased to exist, when "past," "present," and "future" all have lost meaning. This is what makes Semprun's narrative so interesting. It is not the logical sequence of events that dictates the narrative, but the mind's attempt to understand and, at the same time, escape reality.

This is a wonderful and moving novel about a French Resistance fighter of Spanish origin who is captured by the Nazis and sent to Buchenwald. It is brilliantly written, and I would recommend it to anyone intested in good writing, the Holocaust or the human spirit.

A discussion about the German concentration camps and concentration camps in general.
As a matter of fact, these camps are a sign that human liberty is capable of the best and the worst.
It is evident that this discussion cannot have the depth of the novels (memoirs) of Jorge Semprun.
This small book also contains a biography of the protagonists.
A worth-while read.
Congratulations to ARTE.

Memoirs of the period when the author was a minister in the last socialist government of Felipe Gonzalez (1988-1991). He lost his job because of his critic of the government and of his black sheep, Alfonso Guerra, the representative of the faction who stood for bureaucratic and nepotic centralism and for ... corruption in the socialist party. Semprun calls this party a complicated network of arrogant and corrupt men, based on favouritism.
In his well-known associative style with many digressions, the author remembers his encounters as a minister with people like president Havel, the queen of England and baron Thyssen. These are mingled with flashbacks to his youth, Buchenwald, his father and the communist party (Important detail: a member of the Politburo in Moscow (Suslov) pled for an armed uprising in Spain in 1960 in the interest of the ... USSR).

Semprun's work is always captivating. His itinerary in the last century is exemplary for so many men who got disillusioned with their communist engagement. As he says, one who doesn't understand how so much dedication and personal generosity could generate the most horrendous and murderous madness of the last century, will never comprehend the secret of communism.

But this book is more for the Spanish for the biggest part of it talks about Spanish politics.