Jorge Semprún

Career

His family moved to France in the wake of the Spanish Civil War, then to Holland, where his father José María de Semprún y Gurrea (1893 – 1966) was ambassador of the Spanish Republic up to the beginning of 1939. Then, he came back to France with his family to study 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 et 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 (PCE). From 1953 to 1962, he was an important organisator of the PCE clandestine activities in Spain. He entered the party's politburo (Comité ejecutivo) in 1956. But 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. Jorge Semprún is honorary chairperson of the Spanish branch of Action Against Hunger. Semprún currently lives in Paris, where he is a member of the Académie Goncourt.

Style and Themes

Semprún 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. Semprún'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

Semprún's first book Le grand voyage (The Long Voyage) was published in 1963 by Gallimard. It recounts Semprún's deportation and incarceration in Buchenwald in fictionalized form. A feature of the novel, and with Semprún's work in general, is its fractured 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 faithfully retell what it was like to live one day, hour by hour, in the concentration camp, but like Semprún's other novels, the narrator recounts events that precede and follow that day. In part, Semprún was inspired by A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr 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, Semprún explores themes related to deportation, but the focus is on living with the memory of the experience and how to write about it. Semprún revisits scenes from previous works and gives rationale for his literary choices.

References