Claude Lanzmann knows how to get a reader’s attention: the first sentence of the first chapter of his memoir (originally published in French in 2009) is this: “The guillotine – more generally, capital punishment and the various methods of meting out death – has been the abiding obsession of my life” (1). He goes on to talk about seeing a film featuring a scene with a guillotine when he was a child, how it stayed with him: how later, as an adult, he paid attention to executions: “I compelled myself to anticipate or relive the last moments […] of the condemned men,” he says (3). He’s concerned with the moments of “the irreversible,” “the irreparable” (4, 8). This all ties in, of course, to the work for which he’s best known—Shoah—of which he says this: “it is not about the point of departure but about the last leg of the journey, the last junction, when it is too late, when what cannot be undone is about to be done” (513).
But meanwhile, there’s been a whole lot of stuff in Lanzmann’s life, between his birth in 1925 and this book’s writing in 2009, and the book is wonderfully full of so much experience. I like how interesting so much of it is: whether he’s talking about being a passenger in an Israeli army F-16 in his 60s or harvesting grapes in the south of France at age 14, or talking about paintings (El Greco, Goya), Lanzmann makes me want to pay attention. There are some slow stretches (I wasn’t as interested in the sections about fighting in the Resistance—ambushes, weapons, convoys—or the section about visiting Egypt then Israel just before the Six Day War), but mostly I was entranced by Lanzmann’s story, and by his wonderful long sentences: like this, when he’s talking about a painting by Goya:
But one would be wrong to think these legless men are trying to defend themselves; their chief concern is killing, and the resolve of each consciousness to secure the other’s death is so primal that – and this is the excruciating lesson of the painting – there can be no master, no slave, no victor and no vanquished, but since neither values life over death, only two bloody, battered, twisted corpses lying dead beneath a great dark luminous sky of dread, the sky of Aragon or of Castile with its flashes of turquoise peeping through the dense black clouds. (30)
That idea, the idea of valuing life over death, is also clearly part of the story of the survivors who speak in Shoah, and is another one of Lanzmann’s big concerns: he talks, at the end of the book, about “incarnation,” about “wild joy,” about a sense of life, and that, and the way that he captures it, is a big part of the book’s appeal (527-528).
Also excellent are the stories of Lanzmann’s various amorous adventures: going out walking with his stepfather to learn how to seduce ladies with words, having an older married lover, being taken to a brothel for the first time by his father and stepfather, loving and living with Simone de Beauvoir, vacationing with her and Sartre, seducing/being seduced by a nurse in North Korea despite their lack of a common language: there are moments where bits of it feel like picaresque swagger, but mostly it reads as pure delight in life. The sections about travel capture this too, in passages like this, about Lanzmann’s first trip to Italy:
I was intensely excited, the connecting of names with places, the names of stations fleetingly glimpsed in the darkness – Brig, Simplon, Domodossola, Stresa – all attested to the truth of the world, merging language and reality, poignantly revealing the truth. (178-179).
This theme repeats, too, when Lanzmann talks about the making of Shoah, about going to Poland and being staggered by the continued existence of Treblinka: the village alongside the extermination camp, the village that was there when the camp was active, the peasants who were there when the camp was active. There’s also a great bit about the past becoming present in a passage about buying postcards of the Bund in pre-Communist China from a hawker in Shanghai, and more of that same sensation on Lanzmann’s second trip to North Korea, when he tries to revisit the sites of his decades-past unconsummated affair with that nurse. Sometimes this sense that the past is still present leads to sections that feel like settling old scores or trying to have the last word, but the annoyance I felt at those sections was small compared to my interest in the rest.
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