Autobiography and fiction in Semprun's texts.

Jorge Semprun was imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp for eighteen months, from the time he was arrested at the age of nineteen until he was freed at the age of twenty-one (November 1943 to April 1945) and the concentration camp remains the defining experience of his life. In the majority of his novels, essays, articles, and film scripts, the memory of the horrors and deprivations in the camp appears either explicitly or implicitly in an obsessive, repetitive, and recurring form (see, e.g., Peguy). For other survivors the camp signified the place where absolute evil prevailed and any sign of human dignity was absent. For example, Primo Levi expounds on how a logic directed towards evil developed in the nazi camps in order to explain the dehumanization of the inmates (see I sommersi e i salvati). However, for Semprun, Buchenwald resulted in a different perspective and amounts to a somewhat different experience. He was arrested because of his anti-totalitarian conviction which he continued to cultivate and develop in the camp. Despite his young age, the fact that he alone, amongst all the Spanish deportees, could speak German made it possible for him to work in the camp's administrative office where they processed the data of the inmates for forced labor (see Le Mort qu'il faut 28).

In his eighteen months of imprisonment, Semprun felt death in spite of his privileged position. In fact, the shadow of death "ripened in us, spreading through us like a luminous poison, like an intense light that would obliterate us" (Life or Literature 24). Even the essence of that community of "comrades" to which he belonged evoked annihilation and this became more and more present as the days passed and he witnessed the deaths of his friends. At the time of these deaths Semprun turned to literature, this time not to describe them as he would do with Rimbaud previously (see Le Mort qu'il faut 39), but to give comfort to the dying and in some way to comfort himself as in the case of his friend Diego when Semprun recited to him "Espana, aparta de mi este caliz," a poem by Cesar Vallejo about the Spanish Civil War (Literature or Life 192) and during his friend Maurice's final agony, with Baudelaire (Literature or Life 23). For many inmates in the camps literature represented an escape and this was the case for Ruth Kluger, for example, who wrote that in the camp poetry was a "magic formula" (Kluger, Seguir viviendo 126), which made it possible for her to get through the hours of hunger, cold, and pain. And Levi explains that for a moment he was able to forget who and where he was, when he recited verses from the Divine Comedy to Pikolo, a fellow prisoner at Auschwitz (see If This is a Man). Along with comradeship, literature became one of the few lifelines for the young Semprun which allowed him to stay afloat in the horror and despair of the camp.

Paradoxically, upon his release, literature became the dark trap which lay in wait for him again and again with the dark shadow of suicide. Semprun recounts this dangerous affair with death in his Literature or Life, albeit somewhat ambiguously: "Actually, I'd fallen off a train. A rather wheezy train on a suburban line, even: nothing very adventurous, nothing exciting. But had I fallen from this ordinary, crowded commuter train, or had I deliberately thrown myself onto the tracks? Opinions differed; I myself had no conclusive view of the matter. A young woman claimed, after the accident, that I had jumped" (209). In fact, for Semprun to make public his experience of horror in Le Grand voyage sixteen years would have to pass. It was a decade-and-a-half fed by tenacity and perseverance and with a purposeful forgetful and absent-minded Semprun at its center. The decision of "writing or life" was consciously taken one December day in 1945: "I had to choose between literature or Life.... Like a luminous cancer, the account I was wresting from my memory, bit by bit, sentence by sentence, was devouring my life" (Literature or Life 211). Sheltering in "the blissful fog of this amnesia," Semprun fled from writing, something that had molded his life since his early adolescence, because for him this appeared inextricably linked to the traumatic experience of the concentration camp (Literature or Life 226). However, the forgetfulness cultivated by Semprun would be a transitional episode in his life, the necessary stage through which the memory would resurge, fortified and indestructible, to accompany him. This resurgence occurred with the crisis in his intense political activity. Once expelled from the Spanish Communist Party in 1964 and once his revolutionary dream was broken, Semprun decided to anchor himself in writing not only to continue living but also to finally become himself. He states this in his Federico Sanchez se despide de ustedes: "So, in 1964 I was forced to become myself again, or rather to eventually become myself because I still had not truly been me ... Because what is certain is that I could only be myself as a writer and writing had been impossible to me. It had been impossible for me to become myself" "Asi, en 1964 me habia visto obligado a volver a ser yo mismo. Mejor dicho, a serlo por fin, porque todavia no habia sido verdaderamente yo mismo ... Porque lo cierto es que solo podia ser yo mismo como escritor, y la escritura me habia sido imposible. Me habia sido imposible convertirme en mi mismo" (Federico Sanchez 29; unless indicated otherwise, all translations are ours).

In addition to wishing to recuperate his lost identity and to finally become a thinking subject, Semprun immersed himself in autobiographical recreation with the intention of avoiding disproportionate and banal memory, or, in his own words, trying to avoid "Shakespearian delirium" (Munte Ramos and Semprun 130). Semprun discovered the inadequacy of "faithful" narration in the immediate aftermath of Buchenwald, when he heard an account by a survivor of Mauthausen, Manolo Azaustre, who narrated the experience in the concentration camp in Semprun's opinion badly because of the concentration on "facts" (see Munte Ramos and Semprun, "Una entrevista"). For Semprun, the narration of the Holocaust is not to recount it "faithfully"; rather, for him, the "essential truth" of the concentration camp experience--against Theodor W. Adorno's dictum that "after Auschwitz the writing of poetry is barbaric" (30)--can only be transmitted via artistic imagination (this view is also confirmed by such as Holocaust survivor Nobel in Literature 2002 Imre Kertesz also affirms that the concentration camp is only imaginable as literature and not as life [see Kertesz, Diario]). The life writing of the nazi horrors have emphasized the unreal nature of the camps and the traumatic aspects of remembrance. Holocaust testimonies, as noted by Semprun in the prologue of Ruth Kluger's Seguir viviendo suggest that "the texts of this crucial experience of the twentieth century will figure in two completely different categories as separated by future critics. On the one hand, the testimonies ... propose to relate and accumulate the details of real experience ... On the other hand, there is a small category of more elaborate works. One of the main authors of this second category is, without doubt, Primo Levi ... [who] sets out to go beyond the mere testimony which collects informative details of existence, to write a more pure work: he insists that writing must filter reality" ("los textos de esta experiencia crucial del siglo XX se inscriben en dos categorias complementarias que la critica del porvenir distinguira. Por una parte, los testimonios ... [que] se proponen relatar y atesorar datos de una experiencia real.... Contamos por otra parte con una reducida categoria de obras mas elaboradas. Uno de los autores capitales de esta segunda categoria es sin duda Primo Levi ... [que] se ha propuesto rebasar el mero testimonio que acumule datos informativos y existenciales, para escribir una obra mas depurada: el insiste en la necesidad de que la escritura filtre la realidad" [5]). The faith which the authors in this second category of works bring to the capacity of art to bring justice to the indescribable and to that which is impossible to represent, results precisely from this distinction. Thus, from this perspective, not only is there a reaffirmation of the disaccord which, from Plato to Saussure, is surmised between the linguistic sign and the referent which it invokes, but, moreover, it is developed to become the producer of an aesthetic and ethical "truth" at the same time. It is aesthetic because as an artistic device he extracts the ineffable from mere experience and ethical because, to whatever extent the account and the genre adopted for it (from the diary to the novel) is fictionalized, the author is placed as a direct witness of it and consequently makes a testimonial pact with the reader where there is an underlying commitment to collective memory.

If, as we suggest above, Semprun intends to represent truth in his literary project or, said otherwise, to make out of verisimilitude the only possible truth, then what kind of pact will he establish with the reader? Is this autobiographical, novelistic, or is it situated, without losing its testimonial nature because of it, in no man's land, or the ambiguous territory of autofiction? If by autofiction we understand a set of texts presented as fiction and at the same time hiding beneath the mask of autobiography (on this, see, e.g., Alberca 60), then it is understandable that the "autonovels" of Semprun uses it is to establish a literary contract with the reader which is complex and contradicts its own nature. In effect, by presenting it as fictional and self-referential at the same time, this elevates the literary text to the status of indecision and allows the novel and the autobiography to merge in an inextricable manner. The pact that Semprun establishes in works such as Le Grand voyage, L'Evanouissement, Quel Beau Dimanche!, L'Algarabie, La Montagne blanche, or La Mort qu'il faut coincides with that ambiguous contract characteristic of autofiction by playing not only with the subject of the testimony but also by distorting that "literary pact" which Philippe Lejeune defended for the autobiographical genre (see Le Pacte autobiographique). In fact, the dialogue which Semprun maintains with the historical, political, social, and cultural context which he happened to live through is a memoir in itself and because of that strictly inter-subjective. Consequently, and in spite of his fidelity in the face of testimonial commitment, his complete works allow the reader to reconstruct a universe between the real and the invented, or, in other words, between the documentary and a personal reading of those.

Thus, by playing with novelistic techniques, the works of Semprun border on the limits of autobiography but they are not autobiography per se. But how to sketch the face of the subject who holds discourse? What is the color of their voice? Going back to the concept of autofiction focusing on the implication of the veiled presence of the proper name within, we find that its function refers directly to the fictional and indefinite nature of the subject giving the testimony of their presence in the world, as well as of that world where he/she aims to leave his/her personal and non-transferable outline. In this sense, Manuel Alberca claims that "The proper name in autofiction dramatizes in a theatrical manner the postmodern detachment from the self and without abstract theorizing raises identity to fiction or fiction of identity ... Therefore, the person called 'I' in autofiction is and is not the author himself/herself, insofar as they are incorporated as a himself or herself as a character in a novel, is identified and distanced alternately and simultaneously" ("El nombre propio en la autoficcion teatraliza de manera escenografica el desapego postmoderno del yo, levanta, sin teorizaciones abstractas, la identidad como una ficcion o la ficcion de la identidad.... Asi quien dice yo en una autoficcion es y no es el mismo autor, pues, en la medida en que se incorpora a si mismo como un personaje de novela, se identifica y se distancia de manera simultanea y alterna" [67]). The "I" puts the status of the subject of autofiction in a dilemma, that is, the importance of the proper name which signs the text and that, according to Lejeune, confers legitimacy and authority to each autobiography. However, is it the same type of distortion which exists in the testimonies of the concentration camp and more specifically in Semprun's autofiction? In our opinion, the answer is an emphatic no, for one sole reason: the disturbing literality which is, in these cases, given in the authorial dissolution. In fact, in the "signed" accounts of Holocaust survivors the author-testimony must not only confront the disappearance of the "I" in the intertextual mosaic of writing but it must also reconstruct the "I" through the account of its own annihilation.

The dissolution of the autobiographical "I" are achieved in the case of Semprun by the multiplicity of identities, of Semprun's "false names" as a writer and also as a character: Gerard Sorel, Federico Sanchez, Rafael Artigas, Rafael Bustamonte, Camille Salagnac, or Juan Larrea are some of the names which constitute the interminable list of Semprun's alter egos which he regularly changed whenever he changed "room or neighborhood" (What a Beautful Sunday! 132). If all of these are children of the Spanish author's years of hiding, the majority of those have likewise been used as the names of characters in the novels and although they are shrouded to some extent in fiction, they refer to an autobiographical person marked by the anguish of continuing to live. Thus, from Gerard Sorel to Federico Sanchez, from the streets of Madrid to the Buchenwald winter, Semprun's excess of identities remains by contrast the indelible mark of his final condition: the stateless "walking cadaver" ("cadavre ambulant" [Adieu, vive clarte 86]) who only wants to and is only able to exist in language. It is this precise fluctuation of names and identities which corresponds in Semprun's case to the linguistic oscillation which, from his first years of Parisian exile, became a permanent mark of his condition as an exile. At that moment the Spanish writer decided to become bilingual, making language his home and not the language of any one country. He acknowledges this in his book Adieu, vive clarte: "I have made the decision to eliminate all vestige of accent from my French ... To preserve my identity in a foreign country, to convert it to an interior, founding, distinguishing and secret virtue I will blend into the anonymity of correct pronunciation" ("J'ai pris la decision d'effacer au plus vite toute trace d'accent de ma prononciation francaise ... Pour preserver mon identite d'etranger, pour faire de celleci une vertu interieure, secrete, fondatrice et confondante, je vais me fondre dans l'anonymat d'une prononciation correcte" [87]). By making his home of language French, Semprun manages not only to have a "home" tongue, but also to convert exile into his home and his condition to a writer out of his linguistic schizophrenia as he wrote in 1944: "After

all, my homeland is not a particular tongue, neither English nor Spanish; my homeland is the language" ("En fin de compte, ma patrie n'est pas la langue, ni la francais ni l'espagnole, ma patrie c'est le langage" [Mal et modernite 77]).

Once the theory upon which Semprun's literary project has been laid out, it is logical to focus on how this is developed in his most significant works. Amongst these, perhaps Le Mort qu'il faut is the work which best exemplifies what has been outlined here and that is the representation of a multiplied and diffuse "I" and the impossibility of establishing a whole, un-fractured discourse. In Le Mort qu'il faut Semprun relates an episode from his imprisonment at Buchenwald, continuously tinged by a confusing set of flashbacks and flashforwards which lead the reader to dissimilar chapters in his "life story" and which span his childhood and youth in occupied Paris to the present in which the text is being written. The event upon which the narrative is structured takes place in the camp at Buchenwald, in the winter of 1944, when the young narrator of the story sees his life endangered with the arrival of a letter to the Gestapo office, from the central address of the concentration camps, demanding information about his condition and whereabouts. Because of an erroneous interpretation of this requirement by his communist companions, who turn the question into a death sentence, they think up a plan which consists of hiding him beneath the identity of a dying prisoner in order to save his life. A set of mirrors is established in which Semprun speaks through the narrator of the story, whose name only appears on two occasions and not by coincidence under the false name of Gerard Sorel. The latter is reflected, and disfigured, in Francois L., that faceless "other" without his own voice whose name and whose death allow him to survive: "I would live with his name, he would die with mine. In a nutshell, he would give me his death so that I could continue to live. We would exchange our names, which is no little thing. With my name he would turn to smoke; with his I would survive, if that was possible" ("Je vivrai sous son nom, il mourra sous le mien. Il me donnera sa mort, en somme, pour que je puisse continuer a vivre. Nous echangerons nos noms, ce n'est pas rien. C'est sous mon nom qu'il partira en fumee; c'est sous le sien que je suvivrai, si ca se trouve" (La Mort qu'il faut 138). However, this transmutation of names goes beyond pure legal identity. If the Gerard Sorel, who tells the story, "could be" Semprun himself since he bears witness to irrefutable biographical experiences lived by the author (such as writing and publishing other novels of his), Gerard Sorel "could also have been" Francois L. Both were deported to Buchenwald in the same convoy and with practically consecutive registration numbers which makes it if not obvious at least possible that both could have suffered the "initial disinfection tests" in a practically identical time and space. The fate held for them from that moment onwards was different nevertheless. One would end up as a Muselmann (a term used in the concentration camp to refer to inmates who lost all will to live) and eventually in the crematorium and the other's life would be saved and he would make a novel out of it so that this horror would not be repeated. It would be Francois L. himself, represented as the character of the autobiographical mask, who, in his last days of agony, transmits to Gerard his dream of fictionalizing the past torment of his imprisonment and, in doing it, of including the Spanish prisoner as his novelistic companion: "'If I get out of here and write, you will be in my story,' he said. 'But you don't know anything about me!' I answered him. 'What use will I be in your story?' He knew enough, he claimed, to make a fictional character out of me. 'Because you will become a fictional character, my friend, although I won't invent anything'" ("'Si j'en reviens et que j'ecris, je te mettrai dans mon recit, me disait-il. Tu veux bien?' 'Mais tu ne sais rien de moi! lui disais-je. a quoi je vais servir, dans ton histoire?' Il en savait assez, affirmait-il, pour faire de moi un personnage de fiction. 'Car tu deviendras un personnage de fiction, mon vieux, meme si je n'invente rien!'" (La Mort qu'il faut 148). Francois L. died in Buchenwald; starting from him it can indeed be concluded that years later "Gerard Sorel," now Semprun, alleviated his existential emptiness through the invention of a fictional character in Le Grand voyage: "Fifteen years later in Madrid, in a secret flat, I followed his advice ... I invented the boy from Semur to keep me company in the wagon. In fiction we made that journey together to erase my loneliness in real life" ("Quinze ans plus tard, a Madrid, dans un appartement clandestin, je suvivrais son conseil ... J'inventerais le gars de Semur pour me tenir compagnie dans le wagon. Nous avons fait ce voyage ensemble, dans la fiction, j'ai ainsi efface ma solitude dans la realite" (La Mort qu'il faut 148). The reflections in the aforementioned mirror are now multiplied: on the one hand, Francois L. while being a Muselmann, is also that whole and impossible testimony to which we refer when we discuss the crisis of the concentration camp testimony; on the other hand, his "proper name" becomes the safe-conduct of that other name which is in turn hidden under the pseudonym of Gerard Sorel; and, finally, becomes the alter ego of the writer understood, as always, as the character who writes, as the first writer of that fictionalized but real "long journey," created fifteen years later.

Likewise, we find this insane transmutation of subjects who knit the discourse together and are introduced as novelistic characters in Le Grand voyage surely the most emblematic text of Semprun's (auto)biography, which explicitly refers to his experience in the concentration camp. It is the account of the humiliating and claustrophobic journey in a narrow, sealed wagon and the work is characterized by the inclusion of a decentered and dangerously split subject whose voice is multiplied almost infinitely through a constant, breakable, enunciative polyphony. Thus, the first part of the book is narrated in first person and in the present--a discontinuous and fragmentary present, and under the name of Gerard Sorel--whose reflections are interrupted (enriched) by the boy from Semur, the character invented by Semprun. In contrast, the second and much shorter chapter begins with a brusque change to the grammatical third person. With this leap it seems as if with his travel companion dead and in the midst of the "icy night air" ("l'air glace de la nuit" [Le Grand Voyage 261]), the subject, the "I," the "he" and Semprun himself, who until now had fought through memories not to let himself be contaminated by the degradation of the wagon, had been annihilated, inexorably crushed by a reality which is now "beyond the possibilities of his imagination" ("au-dela des possibilites de leur imagination" [Le Grand Voyage 278]). Injured, hungry, and suddenly mute, the masked ghost under the name of Gerard and under the dozens of pseudonyms related to him is seized like a beaten dog to "abandon the world of the living, abandon the world of the living" ("quitter le monde des vivants, quitter le monde des vivants" [Le Grand Voyage 279]).

In What a Beautiful Sunday! we also find a set of identities which are represented by the alternate and unpredictable use of the first and third person to refer to the protagonist of the story. Again Gerard Sorel is explicitly denominated in many ways: Federico Sanchez, Camille Salagnac, Rafael Bustamonte, Rafael Artigas (all of these "war names" from his years of hiding in occupied Paris and in Franco-ruled Spain), and the narrator. This last name, in its original form, is a common name, but used as a proper name in the novel refers to the "function" of the protagonist in the very account being related. Therefore, when he recounts waking up on a snowy Sunday in Buchenwald, Semprun recurs to the perspective of Fernand Barizon, one of his comrades in Block 40, to refer to himself in the third person and to change in the same paragraph to the first person: "The Spaniard has come from the Burgundy resistance group, it seems. In any case, he's in the Party. He's called Gerard ... When he saw Gerard again, years later, fifteen years later, fifteen years after Buchenwald, I was no longer called Gerard, I was called Sanchez, but it was obvious that Barizon didn't recognize me" (What a Beautiful Sunday! 50). One notes that in this fragment, in which there is a leap in time of fifteen years with respect to the events narrated initially, the writer appears as a character in the novel, as well as the narrator responsible for the story. By merging one person with another Semprun succeeds in cracking the illusory effect of the first person, which consists of conveying the indirect with the direct thus showing clearly and explicitly the fugitive nature of each speaking subject and their impossibility to express themselves totally in a satisfactory way.

The breaking down of identity in an indeterminate set of subjects of an almost ghostly whole also takes place in Semprun's novelistic creations. Thus, in L'Algarabie--"an allegoric text of the battle for hegemony between the political sectors derived from Marxism" ("texto alegorico de la lucha por la hegemonia entre los sectores politicos derivados del marxismo" [Molero de la Iglesia 683])--Carlos Bustamante, one of its main characters, suffers a sudden invasion of the unknown. As the mnemonic abysm opened for Proust as he tasted the madeleine, it is not his own past that it revives but the life of Another, which as a last resort constitutes him: "This Other he happened to be had with no doubt written poems.... It was like a palimpsest that had to be deciphered ... He himself, this being, this other, this I, this self lived or even this living being ... or, even better, this experience that was him, this dependence on life encouraged, none of these show, however, the imperious evidence of an identity. In summary, he was an anonymous 'I'" ("Cet Autre qu'il lui arrivait d'etre avait ecrit des poemes, sans doute. ... C'etait comme un palimpseste A dechiffrer ... Lui-meme, cet etre, cet autre, ce je, ce moi, ce soi-meme, ce vecu, ou plutot ce vivant ... ou encore mieux, cette vivance qu'il etait, cette mouvance de la Vie qui l'animait, rien de tout cela n'etait pourtant ressenti avec l'evidence imperieuse d'une identite. En somme, il etait un Je anonyme" [Semprun, L'Algarabie 117-18]). Rafael Artigas, the protagonist of the novel whose name reminds the reader of one of the pseudonyms taken by Jorge pages later offers the key to reading such a palimpsest of memory. Artigas writes poems and more than any other character in the story is the victim of a ghostly existence, marked by belonging to a nation whose borders are delimited only by the smoke from the crematorium of Buchenwald: "I was already dead in that autumn ... My life was but a dream after the grey smokiness of the concentration camp. That grey cloud in which my comrades, both unknown and known, disappeared. Halbwachs and Maspero Piotr and Pedro" ("J'etais deja mort cet automne-la ... Ma vie qu'un reve depuis la fumee grise du camp. Ce nuage ou s'en allaient en fumee mes camarades inconnus ou connus Halbwachs et Maspero Piotr et Pedro" [Semprun, L'Algarabie 141]).

This feeling of alienation from oneself is found in a similar way and in identical circumstances in La Montagne blanche, with an ex-deporte as a protagonist whose passage through horror and humiliation converts him into a fractured subject. This time it is fatal: let us recall that he commits suicide in the end, because, in that October 1979, in the Merano hotel, where he waits for his lover, the restoration of the lost unity, the fusion of his two halves could never occur but in his mnemonic journey to his memories of the concentration camp and in his solitary and cutting evocation of the snow in Buchenwald and of the smell of burned flesh: "But undoubtedly he would be willing ... to accept the recuperation of his unity in a dreadful past which for a long time he has tried to forget. To be himself, even at the cost of returning on a Sunday afternoon to Buchenwald, with the loudspeakers playing Zarah Leander songs" ("Mais sans doute serait-il pret ... a accepter de retrouver son unite dans un passe nefaste qu'il s'est longtemps efforce d'oublier: etre lui-meme, soi-meme, fut-ce au prix d'un retour dans un apres-midi de dimanche a Buchenwald, avec les haut-parleurs diffusant des chansons de Zarah Leander" [La Montagne blanche 91-92]).

In conclusion, survivors, suicides, exiles, or clandestine revolutionaries, the characters who abound in Semprun's work identify themselves without exception with and by the testimony of the concentration camp. As it happens with him, the trauma of that nameless experience leads them to refer to the Holocaust not so much as a "lived" experience but as an incident in which death pervaded all: "For the witnesses, the Holocaust is at once a lived event and a 'died' event: the paradox of how one survives a died event is one of the most urgent ... topics of their testimonies," affirms Langer in Holocaust Testimonies (69). In Semprun and his texts we have the paradox of the manner of narrating this death and, as we have seen, the manner of narrating it through the voice of a ghost who has traversed the darkness and resuscitates solely and exclusively to relate to and report it.

Works Cited

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Alberca, Manuel. "En las fronteras de la autobiografia." Escritura autobiografica y generos literarios. Jaen: Aula de Literatura Comparada. II Seminario. Escritura autobiografica. Ed. Manuela Ledesma Pedraz. Jaen: Universidad de Jaen, 1999. 241-57.

Kertesz, Imre. Diario de la galera. Trans. Adan Kovacsics. Barcelona: El Acantilado, 2004.

Kluger, Ruth. Seguir viviendo. Trans. Carmen Gauger. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 1997.

Langer, Lawrence. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven: Yale UP, 1991.

Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975.

Levi, Primo. I sommersi e i salvati. Torino: Einaudi, 1986.

Levi, Primo. Se questo e un uomo. Torino: Einaudi, 1989.

Molero de la Iglesia, Alicia. Autobiografia y ficcion en la novela espanola actual: J. Semprun, C. Barral, L. Goytisolo, Enriqueta Antolin y A. Munoz Molina. Madrid: U Nacional de Educacion a Distancia, 1999.

Munte Ramos, Rosa-Auria, and Jorge Semprun. "Una entrevista a Jorge Semprun. La narracion de la vivencia de los campos de concentracion en la literatura y el documental." Tripodos 16 (2004): 127-38.

Peguy, Marie. "The Dichotomy of Perspectives in the Work of Imre Kertesz and Jorge Semprun." Imre Kertesz and Holocaust Literature. Ed. Louise O. Vasvari and Steven Totosy de Zepetnek. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2005. 11-23.

Semprun, Jorge. L'Algarabie. Paris: Fayard, 1981.

Semprun, Jorge. What a Beautiful Sunday! Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.

Semprun, Jorge. La Montagne blanche. Paris: Gallimard, 1986.

Semprun, Jorge. L'Ecriture ou la vie. Paris: Gallimard, 1994.

Semprun, Jorge. Mal et modernite. Suivi de " ... Vous avez une tombe au creux des nuages.... " Paris: Climats, 1995.

Semprun, Jorge. Federico Sanchez se despide de ustedes. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1996.

Semprun, Jorge. Literature or Life. Trans. Linda Coverdale. New York: Viking Penguin, 1997.

Semprun, Jorge. Adieu, vive claret. Paris: Gallimard, 1998.

Semprun, Jorge. La Mort qu'il faut. Paris: Gallimard, 2001.

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Semprun, Jorge, and Elie Wiesel. Se taire est impossible. Paris: Editions Mille et une nuits, 1995.

Laia Quilez Esteve and Rosa-Auria Munte Ramos

Author's profile: Laia Quilez Esteve teaches the history and theory of cinema and audovisual communication at the University Rovira i Virgili where she is completing her doctoral dissertation on testimonial representations in Latin-American cinema and literature. E-mail: <[e-mail]>

Author's profile: Rosa-Auria Munte Ramos is working towards her dissertation on Holocaust narratives at the University Ramon Llull where she is a member of the research team on "Violence and Media." Her interests in scholarship include Holocaust narratives, comparative literature, gender stereotypes in communication, and violence and media. E-mail: [e-mail]