What a beautiful Sunday! [antikvár]

It is a winter Sunday in Buchenwald in 1944. A prisoner stands transfixed by the beauty of a tree in the snow. Only wisps of smoke from the crematorium disturb the stillness... Jorge Semprun's extraordinary novel spans the events of his own life: a boyhood in Spain shattered by the Civil War; his time as a fighter in the French Resistance; imprisonment in Buchenwald; a major role in the struggle against Franco; his expulsion from the Communist Party because the revelation of Stalin's crimes led to growing doubts and protest; and the publication of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. The narrative flows back and forth, comparing, contrasting, studying the lessons of history, and telling of the dreams, betrayals, hopes and self-deception of the generation which lives on, marked for ever by 1939 and its aftermath. This is a profound and moving novel, unique in the way it explores and confronts many of the important ideologies and events of the twentieth century.