Elie Wiesel's "The Night Trilogy"

"Night" was less harrowing than I thought it would be. The stark style is moving, especially when it revolves around the author's "betrayal" of his father, but I miss the exact choice of detail and word that would render the incidents piercing. Even the famous description of the hanging of the child lacks focus, capitalizing as it does on sentimentality. At one point the victim is described as a tall and well-built young man. At another he was a mere child. Having reread George Orwell's essay "A Hanging" recently, I could not help comparing the two. There is nothing in "Night" that compares with the victim's sidestepping of a puddle on his way to the scaffold in Orwell, that unforgettable humanizing detail.

"Dawn," a short novel, has a promising premise—a Holocaust survivor becomes a resistance fighter in British-ruled Palestine—but again the the promise was not fulfilled. What plot there is is covered by a thick layer of moralizing and murky pathos.

"Day," another novel, is much stronger. New incidents and characters are introduced at each stage to raise the hope that the protagonist, a Holocaust survivor, would choose life instead of death, only to have the hope dashed. The plight of the survivor, his inability to relinquish his dead and to love the living, is vividly expressed not just through his thoughts but also his actions. The original title of the novel "Accident" should have been kept. Changing it to "Day" in order to complete a trilogy of books that are not written as trilogy, is a mistake, I think.

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