Jorge Semprún

Jorge Semprún (December 10, 1923 - ) is a Spanish writer and politician.

Career

His family moved to France in the wake of the Spanish Civil War. He studied at the Lycée Henri IV and the Sorbonne. After the French defeat and subsequent Nazi occupation of France, Semprún joined the Communist resistance group Francs-Tireurs Partisans. In 1943 he was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Buchenwald concentration camp.

In 1945 he returned to France and became an active member in the exiled Communist Party of Spain. He eventually joined the party's politburo until he was expelled in 1964 because of "differences regarding the party line," at which point he focused on his writing career.

He wrote many novels, plays and screenplays, for which he received several awards, including the 1997 Jerusalem Prize. A recurring theme in his writing is the denouncement of the horror of war. From 1988 to 1991 he served as the Culture Minister of Spain.

Semprún currently lives in Paris, where he is a member of the Académie Goncourt.

Style and Themes

Semprun primarily wrote in French and alludes to French authors as much as to Spanish ones. Most of his works are fictionalized accounts of his deportation to Buchenwald. His writing is non-linear and achronological. Although an event is an announced topic of a work, the narrator spirals through time, exploring the past and future of the event. Repetition is a hallmark of his work. With each repetition, events take on different meanings. Semprun's works are also very self-aware, and his narrators explore the way events live on in memory and the means of communicating the atrocious events of the concentration camp to an audience who cannot conceive of that experience.

Selected Works

Semprun's first book The Long Voyage (Le grand voyage in French) was written in French and published in 1963 by French publishing house Gallimard. In it, he recounts his deportation and incarceration in Buchenwald in fictionalized form. A feature of the novel, and with Semprun's work in general, is its ruptured chronology. Ostensibly, the work recounts his train journey and arrival at the concentration camp. During the long voyage, the narrator provides the reader with flashbacks to his experiences in the French resistance and flashforwards to life in the camp and after liberation. It won the two literary prizes the Prix Formentor and Prix littéraire de la Résistance ("Literary Prize of the Resistance").

What a Beautiful Sunday (In French, Quel beau dimanche) another fictionalized account of life in Buchenwald and after liberation was published by Grasset in 1980. It purports to remain faithful to telling what it was like to live one day, hour by hour, in the concentration camp, but like Sempun's other novels, the narrator recounts events that precede and follow that day. In part, Semprun was inspired by A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, and the work contains a criticism of communism as well as fascism.

Literature or Life was published by Gallimard in 1994. The French title, L'écriture ou la vie, would be better translated as Writing or Life. Once again, Semprun explores themes related to deportation, but the focus is on living with the memory of the experience and how to write about it. Semprun revisits scenes from previous works and gives rationale for his literary choices.