Accident (1962), The Town Beyond the Wall (1964), and The Gates of the Forest (1966). Wiesel has also served as Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council Conference, and has been an American citizen for several years. He is hailed as an extraordinary, gifted writer, one whose works have mythic overtones and a haunting and persistent vision.
Wiesel has said of his own work that it is a series of tales which attempt to be all-encompassing, which work on all levels.
It tries to show what cannot be shown (the holocaust), to explain what is not explained (the weight of history on dreams and dreamers), to recapture an experience that cannot be relived.
His novels are not precisely fiction, nor are they really autobiography, not poetry, but not prose: they are all of these. They detail a spiritual search different than any we have yet to experience with a detail and a starkness which makes us feel as if we have lived through the adventure ourselves. Wiesel's stark language transcends and absorbs the banality of the every day world, and places us in a dream. David Daiches, a well known literary critic, says of Wiesel's work:
It is impossible to discuss Wiesel's novels in the terms which one would normally employ in reviewing fiction. All his works are clearly autobiographical, directly or indirectly . . . The problem they deal with is central in modern experience, so that we are continually led as we read to go beyond the novels to reflect on how we ourselves should think or feel on this issue . . . they are certainly important evidence, great documents, dealing with something which must perpetually haunt everyone old enough to have lived through World War II (The Gates of the Forest, 1966, p. 1).
The world presented in Wiesel's novels is terrible and terrifying--a world where appearances break and where the hallucinations of the soul are the most real.
It is perhaps because the experiences of the de...