Al. Prstojevic, The Witness and the Library: How the Holocaust Became a Novelistic Subject - Novel and Narrative Prose

French Literature Reviews - 2026

Al. Prstojevic, The Witness and the Library: How the Holocaust Became a Novelistic Subject
Novel and Narrative Prose

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Alexandre Prstojevic, The Witness and the Library: How the Holocaust Became a Novelistic Subject

Nantes: Éditions Nouvelles Cécile Defaut, 2012

  • 240 pages
  • ISBN: 978-2-35018-321-3
  • 24 €

Excerpt online: From Testimony to Fiction, by Alexandre Prstojevic (Vox-Poetica)

Publisher's Description:

The Witness and the Library outlines the conditions under which an authentically novelistic Holocaust literature emerged and took shape. It explores how the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and the publication of Piotr Rawicz's Blood from the Sky constitute a turning point: from 1961 onwards, European authors affected by the genocide of the Jews continuously experimented with the limits of the novel, drawing inspiration from the modernist literary aesthetics inherited from James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust.
This conquest of the novel, achieved by Rawicz, Kiš, Perec, Kertész, and Sebald, would provide a solid foundation for a new generation of authors (A. Tuszynska, D. Mendelsohn, J. S. Foer, Y. Haenel, J. Littell...) who emerged on the literary scene in the 2000s to "take up the mantle"—often controversially—of the witnesses who have passed away.
A highly original work on the literature of testimony, demonstrating that it was by adopting the early-century modernist literary aesthetics that the great authors of the Holocaust brought this subject into the universal library...

The trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and the publication of Piotr Rawicz's Blood from the Sky mark a turning point for European authors affected by the genocide of the Jews. Writers such as Danilo Kiš, Georges Perec, Imre Kertész, and W.G. Sebald experimented with the limits of the novel, drawing inspiration from modernist literary aesthetics inherited from James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust, which later provided a solid foundation for a new generation of authors in the 2000s.

Readers interested in the literature of testimony and Holocaust fiction may find this volume relevant. Alexandre Prstojevic outlines the conditions under which an authentically novelistic Holocaust literature emerged and took shape, exploring how the Eichmann trial and the publication of Piotr Rawicz's work constitute a turning point. The publication examines how European authors affected by the genocide of the Jews continuously experimented with the limits of the novel by drawing inspiration from modernist literary aesthetics.