Tusquets Brings Us "Ejercicios de Supervivencia" (Exercises of Survival), Jorge Semprún’s Posthumous Novel

Jorge Semprún is one of the foremost representatives of the memoir genre in twentieth-century literature. In “Ejercicios de supervivencia” (Exercises of Survival), he approaches for the first time the subject of torture, which he endured at the hands of the Gestapo as a member of the resistance against Nazism.

In the fifth anniversary of the passing of this great European writer, Tusquets Editores is publishing a moving narrative about the importance of fraternity and the value of solidarity in the face of injustice and tyranny. Death overtook Jorge Semprún 2011 while he was writing this book. In this memoirs, which Semprún conceived as the beginning of a definitive, systematic autobiographical cycle, the author goes in search of his old self –that 20-year-old philosophy student, the son of a prominent family torn by the Spanish civil war, who in 1943 is detained by the Gestapo and tortured for being a member of the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation. With both extreme modesty and ice-cold precision, Semprún unfolds for the first time in these pages the catalog of horrors to which he and some many others were submitted before being deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Even more meaningful, however, is the moving reflection on the importance of fraternity and the value of solidarity in the face of injustice and tyranny that the author, a survivor of such dire depredations, displays in his masterly “Ejercicios de supervivencia.” Because, as Mario Vargas Llosa points out in his prologue to this book, here we can find «idealism, generosity, courage, moral conviction, and firm reasons to survive.»

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