Night
Elie Wiesel
I was surprised to discover that Elie Wiesel, mainly a writer of books, won the Nobel prize not for literature, but for peace. Night suggests why. Though enormously powerful, Night, Wiesel's personal account of the Holocaust, is not a literary masterpiece. Its style is spare; so spare, in fact, that the narrative sometimes seems on the verge of coming apart. A descriptive term such as "a old shed" may be all the detail for an entire page. Characters sometimes have names, sometimes not, but even when they do they are so lightly sketched out as to feel like disembodied voices.
Probably, this is Wiesel's aim. This thin volume reads like a nightmare, with all its brevity, terror, and evanescence. Scant as it is, it is hard to image a less substantial volume. It is also doubtful that a more imporant book was written in the twentieth century.
We have physical evidence of the Holocaust, including the ruins of Auschwitz and other concentration camps. We have film footage taken by horrified Allied soldiers after the war. Somehow that doesn't matter. What we crave, and get in this book, is personal testimony. The voice of a real human, whose memories hold all the data together and give it meaning. Somehow in a world of media, media, media, the most important medium of all is still the eyewitness. The person who can bear witness.