The Journey: A Novel
By (Author) H. G. Adler
Translated by Peter Filkins
Random House USA Inc
Modern Library Inc
15th November 2009
8th September 2009
United States
General
Non Fiction
Second World War
Fiction in translation
FIC
Paperback
336
Width 131mm, Height 203mm, Spine 18mm
236g
Here is a rich and lyrical masterpiecenotes Peter Constantinethe first translation of a lost treasure by acclaimed author H. G. Adler, a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Written in 1950, after Adlers emigration to England, The Journey was ignored by large publishing houses after the war and not released in Germany until 1962. Depicting the Holocaust in a unique and deeply moving way, and avoiding specific mention of country or campseven of Nazis and JewsThe Journey is a poetic nightmare of a familys ordeal and one members survival. Led by the doctor patriarch Leopold, the Lustig family finds itself forbidden to live, enduring in a world in which everyone was crazy, and once they finally recognized what was happening it was too late. Linked by its innovative style to the work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, The Journey portrays the unimaginable in a way that anyone interested in recent history and modern literature must read.
H.G. Adlers works . . . survive as a magnificent achievement of courage, art, and the stubborn will to survive.Peter Demetz, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Germanic Language and Literature, Yale University
A masterpiece . . . For me, Adler has restored hope to modern literature.Elias Canetti, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
As important a find as Irne Nmirovskys Suite Franaise, and as well translated into English, it is indeed, as Veza Canetti wrote to the author in 1962, too beautiful for words and too sad. Sander L. Gilman, author of Jurek Becker: A Life in Five Worlds
A tribute to the survival of art and a poignant teaching in the art of survival. I tend to shy away from Holocaust fiction, but this book helps redeem an all-but-impossible genre.Harold Bloom
H. G. Adler was the author of twenty-six books of fiction, poetry, philosophy, and history. A survivor of the Holocaust, Adler later settled in England and began writing novels about his experience, The Journey being the first of six works of fiction. Working as a freelance writer and teacher throughout his life, Adler died in London in 1988.
Peter Filkins is an acclaimed translator and the recipient of a Berlin Prize fellowship in 2005 from the American Academy in Berlin, among other honors. He teaches writing and literature at Bard College at Simons Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.